 You know, when we talk about the transatlantic slave trade and how much autonomy was lost, we're talking about freedom over your body, freedom over your language, freedom over your thinking, over your religion, your spirituality. Like everything, everything was stripped, taken away from lands that you knew and stretched so far away from them that there's no way to return. Right? So when you mentioned trauma, there were rules against, right? You could be killed for teaching an enslaved black person how to read and write. What we're trying to do now is educate ourselves, right? And she said a really, another really profound thing later in our conversation, she said we were fighting for equal access to education when we should have been fighting for equal access to neighborhoods. Because where you live, and it's still the case, where you live dictates how good your school is. Your zip code depends on your life outcome. Everything, right? It's crazy. Someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend, Alan? It's all about your perspective. Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? Five, four, three, two, one. What's up, everyone? Welcome to Simulation. I'm your host, Alan Sakyan. We are still on site at the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia. We are now going to be speaking with Dr. Rashay Daniel Barnes. Hi, Rashay. Hi. How are you, Alan? Thanks for coming out of the program. Thank you for having me. We're so pumped for this conversation. We're super excited. And before we get into all of your incredible work, you're an award-winning author. You are also the Dean of Pearson College. Yes. At Yale University. Yes. We're going to get into all of this good stuff. I'm very excited for it. Prior to that, I want to ask you some of our questions that we're obsessed about and we ask all of our guests about. Do you feel like we're all one? As in like the human body community or like even outside of that, like even nature and animals and all of that. Yes. All that is. All that is. I definitely think that there's a, you know, not to be hokey, but you know the whole Lion King idea of the circle of life. I definitely think that there's a way in which we're all connected. I don't know that I would say that we're all one, but I do think that we're all connected. And I think that if we, I think that if we were more attentive to all of those connections, we would satisfy a lot of the problems with our, with our communities and challenges with our climate and our earth and conflicts and a lot of stuff. Yeah. That's a perfect lead into where we like going next, which is is the most upstream issue that's causing all of the downstream issues, those feelings of separation and that lack of feelings of interconnectedness. Yes. Yeah. I agree with that. Definitely. I often define myself as a communal person. And, and so I think that, you know, there are definitely ways in which we operate in the world. And I, it's not everybody, right? There are some groups in our, in our world to understand our interconnectedness and behave accordingly. And then there are others who are very much more individualistic and think that, you know, whatever they do has very little to do with anyone else. And so, yeah, I think we definitely have some issues with not understanding how interconnected we are. Yeah. What would be a principle that you could recommend when we look at things like indigeneity and we look at modernity and we look at what we could potentially do to harmonize these two in a best directional possibility moving forward? What are some of the principles that you've experienced yourself that have helped people with those feelings of interconnectedness? That's really tough, Alan. I mean, I guess on a very, you know, if I think about things like embodiment, which is something that we're really starting to pay more attention to, even in my field of anthropology, when I think about things that are naturally occurring that make us connect more authentically with our interconnectivity, it's things like music and dance. Whenever I see people allowing themselves to be moved by music and movement, I see that interconnectedness. And I think sometimes we get to a point, I think in our process of moving through our life stages and our life cycles of thinking that we're not supposed to move as much, we're not supposed to dance. There's a saying that says dance like as if no one's watching. And that's what happens, right, that as we get older we care and we lose some of that natural ability to be interconnected. And I've seen, you know, I'm traveling with my mom and my grandma through the conference and I've seen, you know, the three generations approach life differently because we're in three different life stages. And one more with your kids. And one more with my, yeah, my daughter was going to come and she wasn't able to because she couldn't get away from classes. So we would have four generations here in different stages of life. And I see, you know, obviously I've known my grandmother since I was born. And she's, she's 91 now. And when I see the way that she interacts with the world, it's very different, you know, from, say, my daughter. And she's, you know, gotten to this point in her life stage where she doesn't, she's not concerned about what people think about her, right. She, she moves through the world with generosity and graciousness, but is very, and I shouldn't say but and is very much just living, right, just, you know, trying to live. And so even her coming to Vancouver was about her, you know, trying to live wholly, fully, right, traveling from Philadelphia to Vancouver. So I think, you know, I was bringing that up to say that the issue of, you know, caring about what other people think, I think sometimes keeps us from being able to make the connections and approach one another as if we are interconnected. There's so much, you know, hierarchy and politics and, you know, stages, steps which are supposed to do when, how, with whom that I think interrupts our ability to really be in community with one another. Yes. Every child is an artist. Every child is, wants to dance and unleash themselves. And we want to keep that through adulthood, the artist and the dancer and unleashing our gifts into the world. And to architect a social fabric that's conducive for that rather than at times feeling like it's choking economic machinery choking the creativity. So there's that. And on a level of, you know, grandmother that's seen the world since like 1930 and seen what's happened and then being able to get behind the perspective and know how to, what is it going to feel like in 40, 50, 60 years just, you know, gliding through as an older person through the world. And I want to also take the interconnection is to even such a thing that is with us all the time, which is the breath. Every breath in comes from phytoplankton and trees. Every bite of the apple comes from the power of the sun. There is no separation. Your words are changing my physiology and my neural architecture as you talk. There's just, there's no disconnection. And to view it in that way and to teach children that from birth is, seems to be a very indigenous principle. And modernity when the children are born into metropolises, there's light pollution, you've changed sheet of paper for the apple, don't grow food ever. So you get these disconnections that, that happen. And so it does really seem like the intertwining of these worlds and bringing the best from them and moving forward is going to be paramount. I also want to see if you have an idea of the purpose of this reality. Of what we're living now? Yes. The purpose. I would have to say that I, that, oh, so you know, so I'm, I'm hesitating because my, my, my own understanding of my relationship with a higher power has to do with would answer that question from the perspective of, you know, from my, from my upbringing, which is about Christianity and about thinking through the purpose for being here as one that is about living through, living out a purpose, living out our own purpose. And, and finding out and only knowing what that purpose is by, by being connected to that higher power. So I feel like the purpose for all of us to be here, the purpose for this world at all has something to do with what the higher power sees as our purpose, which I don't know what that is. Yes, yes, yes. We were briefly talking about this before we started, but it is that all of these, since the dawn of time, all of these teachings and feelings of the interconnectedness, the unconditional love, the higher power, all these types of feelings, the one, the unity, the source, the Big Bang, the universe, whatever you want to call it, are all pointing up the mountain from different perspectives. And it's very pluralistic, coexisting, no problem. But even that to harmonize together on this grand project that is being played out called Earth, called this big, at times it feels like it is a big learning simulation that we're all a part of, that we're, we're helping it, it, the one become more alive, understand itself better through this game that we're playing that in the deepest levels of interconnectedness. And so this is a big challenge. It feels like this is a big challenge. Will we be able to rise to the occasion to understand the interconnectedness and to build the next world that has a more conducive social fabric for flourishing? And that's what our, like one of the main principles is of the program is inspiring people to realize that next world and to all cohesively push forward and build it. Because in doing so, we can fulfill the ultimate pinnacle paramount destiny of what could be. And that's what puts the smile on the faces of us all. That's how, that's how I, it's been fun to interpret the reality. Yeah. So, so it sounds like you think our purpose is to be interconnected and have this kind of cohesiveness that is, yeah, that, that makes sense. And also individually to be able to express our gifts into the world and make it a good social fabric to make it fun for people to do so. Right. So those two things, again, it's kind of like an individualism, collectivism, marriage as well and interconnectedness. Yeah, because there's a, yeah, there's a, you have your own responsibility to live out your, your own purpose that, but that should be working in, you know, working in community with everyone else. Yes. Yes. So take us, I want you to take us through a macro level understanding of kind of what has been unfolding. Because we, this really has to go back to probably somewhere around like the 500 or so years ago of just the process of beginning to go and colonize from, from Europe towards the rest of the world and then having things like the transatlantic slave trade happen and then having just, just, just honestly put, there is a lot of trauma that needs to be healed. And we need to grow through that and collectively evolve and, and be honest and loving and caring about all of that process. So that has, that has created a lot of complexity in our world. Help us see it on the macro level of what you've been doing as an anthropologist. And you mean the, in terms of the history of that or, or in terms of, And what it brought forth, the history of it and what it brought forth? I mean, I think it's important for us to note that we don't get modernity without the transatlantic slave trade. And so, and so, so many things had to be happening at the same time for that to, or not at the same time, I mean, it happened over time, right? We talk about the transatlantic slave trade as if it was like, you know, one blip in time, but it took a really long time to, to manifest itself in the way that it eventually did, right? That, you know, that when we talk, when we say the transatlantic slave trade, we're talking about, you know, a 300 year period that went through, you know, ebbs and flows of, you know, how people were going to be moved and what communities were going to be affected, both in Europe and in Africa and outside and even the indigenous communities that were affected in the Americas, you know, by this transatlantic slave trade that also, you know, often are not part of the conversation. So, you know, a macro view, you know, if, I mean, I guess you're asking if we're thinking about it in terms of, you know, how these, how this interconnectedness maybe got got challenged, got broken down, or is that where we're headed? Yeah, well, yeah, where did, where did the thought come that one can own someone else? Yeah, so, so that already existed, right? So historically, slavery existed long before the transatlantic slave trade, but it was done differently. So, you know, people were enslaved in various parts of the world because of wars or because of debts or because of, you know, I mean, it's always been about resources and territories. And so, I can't even tell you when that started. I mean, that's in all of the ancient texts, right, that people were involved in slavery in some way. But it's not until the transatlantic slave trade that we have a moment where people are no longer being seen as people, right? Because even when you were enslaved in previous periods, you know, you were in a lower caste, so to speak, but you could marry out of it, your children weren't trapped into it. And so, you know, there was freedom even in the enslavement, and that was not so during the transatlantic slave trade, right? That freedom, freedom ended, right? There was no more freedom over any part of yourself, right? Of your nothing, right? No, nothing, right? Not even your language, right? Which is something that I talk with my students about even in terms of the way that colonization took hold at the same time as the transatlantic slave trade, right? So that European nations were coming into various places and saying, okay, no more your language, right? Our language is the one that you need to know and the one you need to speak. And so I've actually had students say to me that speaking in, in a mostly European tongue that is not their indigenous tongue is a type of enslavement in and of itself because being able to express yourself in your language is often very different from expressing yourself in another language, right? The translation isn't exact, the emotion, the embodiment, right? It's not, it's not exact. And so it feels like losing parts of yourself. So I bring that up to say, you know, when we talk about the transatlantic slave trade and how much autonomy was lost, we're talking about freedom over your body, freedom over your language, freedom over your thinking, over your religion, your spirituality, like everything, everything was stripped, taken away from lands that you knew and stretched so far away from them that there's no way to return. Right? So when you mention trauma, right, that's one of the things that I'm, you know, we were going to talk about some of my current projects, but my, my often the distance project is about health and disparities, disparities in health for black women who I think I'm not a medical anthropologist, but just some of the work that I've been reading by people like Fleet Amass, Jackson, Leith Mullings, Donna Iain, Davis, these are people who have been doing work in, in reproduction care bridges, have been doing work in reproductive health for black women and starting to theorize the effects on the effect of this trauma on black women's bodies over time, right? That you can't actually see. Everybody's moving through the world. It seems quite well, but then when it's time for, you know, for things that seem very basic to happen, you know, things like childbirth and delivery, these things become complicated and we're starting to think it has a, you know, biomedical source. So, so really starting to think through how these traumas, you know, because we can talk about these traumas as being passed down by a cultural memory, but we know that our bodies have memory as well, right? Yeah, epigenetics, yeah. So, yeah, all of that. Yeah, my goodness. Yeah, when you're giving me this, this visual of kind of a cultural lineage that was experienced by peoples and then when it's completely transplanted, I mean, it's all stripped away. It's all stripped away. I mean, it's every component, spiritual, mental, physical, emotional, well-being, language, I mean, it's all just stripped. Food, music, right? All this stuff. And then it's, yeah, that's the real like way to, I guess, awaken to what it would be like to, you know, forbid just if we really need something as egregious, as a VR experience of being trapped in a dark-ass boat and chained next to a bunch of other people for people to empathize and realize and heal the trauma. But it's without doubt. I mean, it's also interconnected that when you have something like it, for me, it's like this big, red, gaping wound in the Atlantic. That's what it like feels like. And then it's symptomed out with its flowering into all other types of issues that we have. Yeah. And I think, I mean, I do want to be clear that there was an attempt to strip everything away, right? But we were able to retain some things. And so, you know, despite lots of best efforts to strip it away, right? To strip away all language, all culture, all spirituality. We know, especially as anthropologists, and especially in the black anthropological tradition, we know that many, many things were retained. And because people resisted, right? People were interested in finding ways to keep themselves, right? To keep some sense of that autonomy. And there are a lot of ways in which that has been passed down also, right? And, you know, we can see it in even a lot of American music. There are musical traditions that have been been retained, familial practices that have been retained, preparations of foods that have been retained, even foods themselves, because many of them were brought from the West African coast and planted in the Americas. And then people were brought to tend them. So, you know, some of the foods and the ways that they're prepared have been retained. So, you know, I think there is a lot of trauma. But one of the things I talk to my students about a lot is that the story isn't all bad, mostly bad, super bad, very traumatic, horrible. But we've been people who, and peoples, right, who have been resilient as well. Yeah. Yeah. It becomes our collective responsibility to awaken ourselves to the healing process that needs to happen worldwide around these deepest issues with migrations, forced migrations, ceakings of asylum, border conflicts, warfares, over time harmonize towards decreasing military industrial complex budgets, focusing more on childhood education around the planet, bringing prosperity to all. It's just it's so mind-blowing buying a cup of coffee for $3 in modernity and then realizing that 50% of the planet makes less than that in a day. And then looking at modernity and realizing that so many of these things like a transatlantic slave trade was a catalyst of modernity and being truthful about that process. And I'm really happy that you also talked to students about the importance of what was the perseverance and what was the grit and the retention of the cultural heritages and lineages and how to actually keep those alive and roaring. Yeah, we were talking to Tiffany Marquise Jones on the show as well, yeah, about the retention of Chocolate City in DC through spoken word, poetry and art. And that's a great way to express oneself and keep lineages roaring with light. Yeah. Take us to then how raising the race, black career women, redefine marriage, motherhood and community. This is your award-winning book. Yes. How, what was the thesis of it? I have a copy of it, can I show it? I would love to put it right here on the set. Exactly. Now that we have the copy next to us. Yes. Give us the thesis. Yeah. Essentially, the book is taking a look at how, and going back a little bit to what we were talking about it just a few minutes ago. And that is how black communities, black families have responded to a lot of the challenges to family life that have happened even since slavery. So recognizing that slavery did a lot to disrupt black family life, actually disrupted black family life. So even the movement from the continent to the Americas was a disruption, a break, because people were not brought here with their families. They were usually taken stolen from their families. And once here made to produce workers. So reproduction became a means of production. And those, the offspring that were made of that during slavery were then enslaved. So black women were forced to, through their reproduction, continue to create people who were going to be a means of production. And so what black families have done, though, going back to this idea of survival, perseverance, retention, have worked really, really hard to preserve some sense of family kinship, care. And over time, that has fallen to primarily women, right, to mothers. And so what black people in America, primarily the U.S. South, but there are other parts of the Americas that have done the same, have created what we call a metrophocal family in response to the situation, which was that fathers often were not present, particularly in slavery, right, could be sold away, or didn't know who the father was, or maybe the father was the overseer or the master. And so, right, no father present. So mothers, women became who raised the children and took care of the community as a whole. And so what I really talk about in the book is, while I'm talking about the contemporary moment and how mothers, black mothers are responding to the challenges of modernity in trying to raise their children and have what is supposed to be a model family, they are leaning on a lot of the traditions that they have learned over time through their mothers. And the response has primarily been even over time. And what I come up with is a concept that's called black strategic mothering. And the idea behind that is, over time, black women have been having to rethink the way that they interact with essentially the world, right, the workplace, the relational parts of themselves, vis-à-vis their men, vis-à-vis their women, vis-à-vis their mothers, grandmothers, fathers. They've had to create these these responses that are about the survival of their children first and the community as a whole. Because it's always been the case that black women have never only been responsible for their own biological children. They've always had to be concerned for the children, the community of children, right. And so the book really goes into this particular moment and how black women who have acquired education, who have acquired means are at a particularly interesting point in our history where they have the ability to make decisions about whether or not they are going to be in the full-time workplace or be at home moms. And this is a very new, relatively new phenomenon, right. There have been black women who have worked from home historically. There were protective measures put in place, especially in the Jim Crow South, because having a black woman working outside the home was what could be particularly dangerous, especially if she was working in the home of a white family or at a white business. She was very vulnerable. So there we have a record of in a history of black women working from home, but this is a little different. This is I have the education and the professional pedigree to work outside the home in a professional context. But I am choosing to make some different decisions about my relationship with work, because at this particular moment, I think it's very important for me to be more responsive to my children and my husband, my partner, than to the workplace, which used to be the way that black women really focused on uplifting the community, because it was because of the history of the economic system in our country, black women were more likely to be gainfully employed than black men, even though they were making less money, they could keep their jobs longer, usually, than black men. So being able to make a decision to leave the workplace means that your partner is able to sustain the household, which is new, and you are able to redirect your efforts away from a communal look outward to one that is more inward and focused on your own kids. Now, what's complicated about that is that the black family unit has always tried to be more of a collective. Black families have been looked to as ones that were examples of how to do child care from a communal perspective, rather than a nuclear perspective. So the challenge in this upward mobility is that there's a turn away from the communal and one that is more toward the individual. Part of what I theorize in the book is that these women are seeing themselves, even though they are turning to an individual response that has a lot to do with the neoliberal market, they're turning to an individual response, but I argue that it's from a communal perspective, because what they want to do is be good representations of black families, because the number of good black families has been declining, and how do we define good? Well, if we talk about marriage and family, many people think about it as two parents, and they're happy, and they're raising the kids together, and when I say two parents, I mean lesbian, or gay, whatever the combination is, but two parents raising the kids and keeping them safe and on track and educated and so on and so forth. So it's a really, it's an interesting time in our contemporary moment to think about what kinds of responses people are having to the lack of public supports and even employer supports that make it possible for people to be able to live out their purpose and be in tune with their kids' purpose and make sure that those things are going to be successfully attained. That was a long answer, sorry. It was in the exact amount of nuance that I wanted. Yes, I loved it. Okay, let's go through that. So we had another way of viewing what we were talking about prior to that, where you gave us an understanding of this role of on top of being moved to a stripped away of that culture and being brought to that new place that then there was this process of making more humans for the process of production, of being slaves for production, and then having the, there's a maternal focus, a matrafocal process of raising children, matrafocal. And then over time, then there's obviously a tremendous amount of changes that have happened with, but you give us the example of, well, women in general post civil war, post healing, for us at least the first parts of the healing, women beginning to raise children at least in their own homes, women having the option of gaining the right to vote, having the option to go to the workforce if they would like, lots of time was spent at home raising children for women and men were able to earn enough money to provide for the entire home. Meanwhile, nowadays median male income is like very stagnant while GDP skyrocketing, a lot of that again, 1% taking like 50 plus percent of the actual new fruits that are emerging. So when we look at what is going on with the movement towards nuclear families in general, is it then that women entering into hierarchies can be for careers, can be both helpful for them on leashing gifts into the world, men learning how to also nurture children being extremely important. And as in indigeneity was much of that. So there's a sort of communalism that was such a vital part of the way that we harmonized our communities, which now has definitely looked turned into little like suburban boxes on the hill sides and little units stacked in skyscrapers on top of each other. And that a big question is, you know, in this coming from the perspective of African Americans is a perspective, which is one layer of identity also from the whole perspective of just in general nuclear families going into the little boxes on the hillside, which is what are we going to do about the process of everyone going into that mode of of and how do we come how do we come into some sort of a deeper cohesion with our communities, albeit it's like this is such a different phenomenon. It just feels so different to me. I've never felt studying history with such vigor over time. I've never really seen something that was so deeply nuclearized as it is. And it just it seems like when everyone is spending all of their time in their nuclear styles of family with the devices and the internet and the drone deliveries and the virtual worlds and and everyone's buying their own goods for that property itself. I mean, it's it's a very it kind of also takes us to that point of disconnection rather than interconnection. So is there also is there also like a proposal of sorts to like you indicated it's also kind of about showcasing like, you know, we are we are a successful black family in the United States. Yeah. And that's also a very see it be it is such an important modality here. And we were also learning that it's I think Washington DC that has the richest black neighborhood and then Atlanta is the second richest. And if you just like look what are what are some of the skills or habits in those places are we retaining community as we're also going to nuclear families? It's a great question. I think, you know, for some of the families that I interviewed, yes, people are even though they're they're turning their focus towards their nuclear, you know, they're wanting to make sure that their kids are safe, right? Because there's especially for black parents, there's a lot of precarity around making sure kids are their kids are fine, right? And we could probably talk for a whole another hour about why that's a source of precarity for black families, particularly even black middle class families, right? Like you like people expect that, you know, black families that are that are in low income situations, precarity makes sense, right? There's probably a lot of stuff for you to be concerned about, right? But for black middle class families who think that they're moving from those spaces into, you know, these suburban boxes, these, you know, high rise boxes, they think they're creating some degree of safety are finding that that safety isn't necessarily there or it's elusive or they still have to put up some, you know, some mechanisms to make sure that that they have some degree of control over that. And what they what they find is that is that the way what these women found was that the way that they could ensure some degree of that safety, what they felt was they needed to pay more attention at home, right? But that didn't mean that they didn't want to also be connected to the community. So many of them, while being very focused on their own nuclear families, were also being very intentional about being in these suburban, you know, boxes with other people so that they could find the community with those people. So there were a couple of families that I highlighted in the book who intentionally moved in a particular neighborhood because they knew that that neighborhood had people that they already knew that they could do family meals together, that they could, you know, have their kids do swimming lessons together at the community pool, right? So there are ways in which they were saying, okay, we're we're nuclear focused, we're inward focused, but we're going to find ways to still build and be in community, right? Still very involved in their churches, still very involved in communal organizations that are about, you know, volunteering or doing things in in other parts of the black community, right? Now it's still complicated. I don't mean to say that this, you know, fixes everything, but there are ways in which interconnectivity is still intentional, right? They're still thinking about it from that perspective, even as they are creating these more nuclear family forms that are less about the metrophocality and more about the the nuclear, yeah. Yeah, this seems to be something that could potentially be applied to urbanization just in general and metropolises in general as as we move into more of the nuclear family-esque behaviors to do things like create more communal activity and yeah, I really, I really like the ones you listed of bringing bread together, doing things like swimming, other communal activities of learning and experiencing together, yeah, yeah, keeping memories together. Yeah, yeah, there was one woman who talked about how she'd grown up in New Orleans on a street with, you know, you know, not a lot of means, like people in her community didn't have a lot of means, and and you know, there were like, there's like two streets where all the kids knew each other and they all played together in her in her upbringing. And she said, you know, when she was looking for a community to raise her family in, she was looking for how to recreate that. And because she wanted her kids to grow up in that kind of that kind of relational space, right, where they were, you know, they weren't locked away in their suburban house, but they were out, you know, playing and meeting the other kids in the neighborhood and stuff like that. But, you know, my current project is looking at how black women are making decisions about school. And part of the reason, school choice, and part of the reason why I'm on that subject now is because of the women in my book who were saying that, just kind of jumping off for what you were, what we were talking about just before, that the schools are a point of contention for many families. Because education is such an upstream issue. Yeah. Yeah. And who's educating? I mean, my session for the panel, or my session for the conference this year was a panel on with black women who were talking about the research that they're doing about black education and black schools. And we had Signithia Fordham, Dr. Signithia Fordham, who wrote two books about black kids in schooling. And she talked about, you know, she made a very good point as we were getting started in the panel. And she said, you know, we have to differentiate between conversations about education and conversations about schooling. Schooling has always been a place of contention for black kids and black families, because basically they weren't designed for us. We weren't ever supposed to be educated, right? We weren't ever, no one, there were rules against, right? You could be killed for teaching an enslaved black person how to read and write, right? So she's like, you know, it was, was never, we were never intended, right? What we're trying to do now is educate ourselves, right? And she said a really another really profound thing later in our, in our conversation. She said, we were fighting for equal access to education when we should have been fighting for equal access to neighborhoods. Because where you live, and it's still the case where you live dictates how, how well, how well your school, how good your school is. Your zip code depends on your life outcome. Everything, right? It's crazy. It's crazy. So, so that's where I am now in the, in the new project is looking at how moms in particular are navigating those spaces, right? Trying to get their kids the, you know, a good education, good education and what that means. Yes, yes. And I really appreciate these added profound aspects to school choice. Such such an upstream issue, as we were discussing in the very beginning is the education of the child towards that interconnectedness, that unconditional love, doing project-based learning around the sustainable development goals, healing traumas, all this kind of stuff, pursuing their north stars, et cetera. Yeah, I love that. Yes, I know. We all have it and to unleash it. Yes. And what that would do for our world. And then you give, you gave us all these added perspectives to it, which is that it's fighting for schooling versus fighting for zip codes, right? What that could have done. Or also just education in general is a whole suite of other things, especially given the newest forms of technology that exist. One can spend a lot of their time educating themselves even outside of the school system. Right. And then how do we then do things like make it so that no matter really, hopefully, wherever you are in the world, that you gain access to the highest level of democratized knowledge possible, where you yourself can kind of have an a la carte buffet of options for you to pick what most feels like your north star and keep going in that direction and educate yourself along with mentors, community, other kids. But you gave that example too, which also is so true that you, how can one, if you go through an experience where you do make so many good young friends, you're playing in the streets and all this stuff, but then you have children yourself and you're like, how do I find a pocket of these boxes where it seems like there's actually community for my kids to get raised in? Yeah. Yeah. We have a lot of challenges. Where do I start? Redirect me. Where do I start? I mean, the marriage of kind of your book plus school choice, I mean, it totally makes sense. It's like, these are what we want to propose now on the social fabric redesigns is again, just like, can we look at things in such a multivariate way where we can propose, yes, the information technology wave this year. So we do want to democratize it. Yes. But then there's also the whole zip code schooling thing is still existing. Yes. So how do we decrease obstacles, decrease tensions, increase community spaces? Yeah. These are great questions and things that I think about a lot because my new project is rooted in a neighborhood that is connected to a neighborhood school. Both have been declining over the last 20 years. And so what I've been trying to think about is these are communities, right? And the folks in these communities want good schools, right? And they want nice communities, right? Everybody wants the same things. Everybody wants to grow up in a nice environment, safe environment where they can educate their kids and know that their kids are safe and taken care of and loved. And so when we think about how to marry the access, right? So much technology. We have access. We could design, you know, we could come up with a worldwide syllabus, right? That could be on the internet and you could click on the text and you could go right to them and educate yourself. I think that, but at the same time we can't be so dependent on technology that we don't go outside and connect with our communities, right? And I think that there is room for, and definitely there is room for a model that allows us to do both, right? I think what I'm challenged by is there's so much available via technology. I don't think our kids know how to scaffold. They don't know what to pay attention to. They don't know what's a good source and what's not. How to scaffold. That was a really good way to put it. If you haven't, if you've discovered at least part of what your North Star may be, how do you begin scaffolding what you learn? So it's like having a meta perspective on your learning to get towards that. Yeah, that's, I like scaffolding. Thank you. Yeah. And so that's the thing, right? It's the reason, you know, my husband is an educator and he says all the time that we're going to get to a point where we don't need teachers. He's a teacher, he's a high school teacher. And he says we're going to get to a point where they're going to think they don't need us anymore, that they can stick a computer on a robot and the robot talks and the kids learn and AI coaches. Yeah. Yeah. And then maybe, and he says maybe the elite will be the ones who have, because they always have, will have tutors that work in tandem with the robots, the AIs. I think there's probably some degree of, of unfortunately truth is to what he's, what he's thinking about and guessing at. And that, that, that, honestly, that scares me. And I usually tell him, no, no, no, we're, no, they'll never get rid of teachers. Teachers are so necessary. But when we look at the way that teachers are treated and the ways in which teachers are being replaced by, by really well educated, vetted teachers who teach well are being, they are being replaced by much younger, not as experienced, not as well vetted, just out of college, young people who are very earnest in their desire to, to, to, to help and to teach even. But the fact that they are, you know, in some ways being used as a, as an army of, of, of, able to be, and able to be, able to be paid less and move into these spaces with tech says to me that my husband might be right, that, because it'll be way easier to replace them, right? With AI, right? And that's so interesting. So the tech, technophiles, people that are like well trained in technology that also will be, that are accepting less pay, which teachers should be paid incredibly well, but the more tenure teachers are being paid a little bit better. And so they're yet, yes, then as the whole area of where humans are able to complete tasks better than AI is actually really rapidly decreasing. Yes. Just in general. Yes. So we have to figure out what to do. And universal basic ownership in our future world is going to be crucial as the emerging technologies and markets come. Can we democratize the fruits of those markets and techs to the rest of the planet? Yes. So there's inclusive stakeholder rather than some sort of speciation on socioeconomic status, which everybody in the back of their mind truly knows is possible. And we are trying to mitigate that by having billionaires and governments and corporations around the world. Can you really deeply connect to your hearts? Can you connect to unconditional love and interconnectedness with the environment with other humans? And try and really see the next world where it could be that everyone's unique gifts are brought forth and that there is no dystopian crap that happens. But it's only figuring out how to keep building the next best worlds moving forward. I'm just so wanting to help us focus our directional arrow over there. Because you can sell the story about the asteroid hitting the planet, or you can sell the story about exploration and trying to have billions of more people that get to endeavor into consciousness and be creative and feel love and interconnection and bring gifts forth into the world. And that's why we should go to other celestial bodies. And there's all these different ways to tell the story and telling it in the direction of, yeah, there will be benefits to an AI teacher. I mean, having a whole corpus of biotechnology when you yourself are trying to learn about the inner workings of a cell at the level that it knows rather than the limited capacity of a three pound brain knows is helpful at times. But to have something that has a spirit, something that deeply has a socio-emotional capacity to engage in, that is still going to be part of the equation. We foresee for a while, but then there's still that question mark. And what do we do? How do we have discourse around that? And I think the thing for me too is who gets to decide what that AI is teaching? The inner workings of a cell is a little bit easier. That's easier. That's for sure easier than something like history. Yeah, because there's a tremendous amount of biases and who programs... Which we already know, right? We already know that there are biases. Yeah, we already know that. I mean, I just saw on my Twitter feed that there's some tech that they're running right now. I can't remember the source, but there's some tech that they're running right now that is meant to read passports and can't pick up darker skin tones. Who programmed that? Not someone with a dark skin tone. Because if you look at a corpus of images and you don't see any darker skin tones, you're going to know that it's not going to be able to read the darker skin tones. So this is a lot of this is really, again, it comes to inclusive stakeholder, inclusive fitness just in general. Having people at the table of deciding on where we're going that represent a very unique array of perspectives about the future of our world, especially the most people that have studied philosophy, ethics, morals, the most spirituality, the most in a cohesion with people that have studied science and anthropology, engineering, design, all these different fields kind of can, you know, harmonizing for the next, because if we choose to so see the next world as one that is filled with peace, harmony, abundance, and we can, like you said earlier, scaffold our way to it and sell that story to get to it. That I feel is most prosperity oriented and less so when we looked at other stories. Your point about what is actually within that AI coach and what it's teaching is really important how it's not biased, how it's, yeah. I'm really happy that this back and forth has taken us to also not only within such depths of interconnectedness and history, but then also to modernity and future around what we're doing. The Dunbar number is really interesting and there's a lot of projects around little communities of like 150 or so people and having the growth of food and the water cycle processes there and the communal processes there and educational processes. And I think that's also a very interesting component to this equation. Yeah, that may be quite vital. And people are, I think people are experimenting with that. I know there's a community south of Atlanta that is experimenting with having these communities where people are growing food. It's not co-housing, but it's similar, where people are growing food and they're doing things more locally. They're locally sourcing things and it's also available to the outside people who don't live there. But the thing that concerns me about how even that space is being actualized is expensive. It's expensive to live there. So also there's this thing of even in creating these new, these alternatives that are getting us closer to the collective, the interconnectedness, often they come at a premium. They're not happening kind of organically. It's someone saying, okay, we're going to buy all this land and we're going to build housing and it's going to be at different price points, but it's still going to be cost prohibitive for a lot of families that could benefit from that. And it seems like every time our husband, he's trained as a city planner and engineer. And every time we go into one of these older cities that was designed hundreds of years ago, he's like, we already knew how to do this. Why are we creating these space? We already know how to live together. We already know that you have this housing that is designed for multiple families and you have green spaces that are designed for being in community and being outdoors and planting. And yet we go off and make gated communities and then we make shopping centers and put lots of parking out front and it's like... Yeah, cities 2.0 for the future of cities feels with like a mix between the indigeneity and modernity and it feels more like it embeds the interconnectedness and the unconditional love in the communities and the more holistic systems of food growth and water cycling and energy cycling. And this is really great that we're getting to... I want to ask you one more final question that we ask on the program. What do you think is most beautiful? As a thing or just anything? Anything. Most beautiful is it's going to sound hokey, but love. And what I mean by love is how it's manifested in care. Yeah, care I think and generosity of spirit. Yeah, that's what's most beautiful to me. Love, manifested in care and generosity of spirit, yeah. Which feels like it is one of the main achievements that we can have when we find ourselves in this reality. How can we bring that best forth in ourselves? Yeah, absolutely. That's what most... That selflessness brings us the most high-stealing. Yeah, that's what I strive for and to receive and to give. Yeah, yes, yes, yes. Which we receive every breath and give every breath. I appreciate it. Thank you Alan. This was a great conversation. We appreciate it. We appreciate you so much. Thank you. Thanks for all your great work. Thanks everyone for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode. Let us know what you're thinking. Also check out the links in the bio below to Rache's profile. Also her book page. Check that out. Also check out her LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. Check those out in the bio below. Also support the American Anthropological Association. 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