Baratunde Thurston (Part 1)

squeaky wheel in the background. It's just more about being a part of the universe, you know, this idea that you know, I'm feeling you're going to have to run with this of curated reparation. I feel like this is some interesting I'd like to get the tea way and Jeremy Harris have to say about the Geese reparation. I want to be a Black Panther movie. Yeah, like I want massages on a weekly basis to work out the knots of races. Did that reside within my body? So

it's very related, you know. And it's like a job creator. You know, that's like a real that's a skill, and I'm rewarding that skill with tax per Hello, I'm mini driver, I'm welcome to many questions. I've always loved to prous questionnaire. It was originally an eighteenth century parlor game meant to reveal an individual's true nature. But with so many questions,

there wasn't really an opportunity to expand on anything. So I took the format of Pruce's questionnaire and adapted what I think are seven of the most important questions you could ever ask someone. They are when and where were you happiest? What is the quality you like least about yourself? What relationship, real or fictionalized, defines love for you? What question would you most like answered, What person, place, or experience has shaped you the most? What would be your

last meal? And can you tell me something in your life that has grown out of a personal disaster. The more people we ask, the more we begin to see what makes us similar and what makes us individual. I've gathered a group of really remarkable people who I am honored and humbled to have had a asked to engage with. My guest today is Barrett Tunday Thurston. Now, as you know, I ask all of my guests the same seven questions, and I choose to share with you some of my

favorite conversations that emerge from those questions. However, there have been conversations where each answer provides a thread that just cannot be cut, or helps paint some new version of a larger picture. My interview with Barrett tun Day was one of those conversations, and with every single question, I just wanted to share more and more of our discussion. So I will be sharing that conversation I had with him with you over the course of two episodes today

and next week. I am talking to Barrettunday Thurston. All right, when and where were you happyest? I you just you just jump right in there. Oh yeah, I'm not like we did, I thought, Okay, let the trials begin. When and where? It was the summer. I was standing on a beach facing west That beach was in Senegal, facing Westman, looking across the Atlantic Ocean back towards the United States.

This was my first time having flown across any ocean, my first time having been anywhere on the continent of Africa. I had graduated high school a few weeks earlier. I was on a trip with fellow students from my high school, all black, chaperoned by our black Senegalese French teacher who was not my French teacher because I didn't study French. I studied Spanish. But he was offering trips to Africa, and we were like, we're going, And most of us were not in his French class, but we were all

in in the class of black stuff. So standing on that beach, I felt grateful and overwhelmed and at significant peace. I hadn't felt that way up until that point in my life. All in one moment, and the waves were big, there was this like pacing in between them, and I walked out into the ocean and I had I had a thought that well, not sound exciting, but it was so profoundly happy. I thought if I died right here,

I'd be Okay. I've had a really good life and I got to come back here and not want to die. But if something should happen, I don't think I would have massive regrets. At seventeen, I thought this to myself, and I felt happy in that place at that time in a way that still stands out to me at forty three years old. Wow, that's pretty young to really let happiness in one and have the acceptance of it being enough. Because I feel like happiness is so often

quantified by that there are aspects that aren't enough. If I had more of this thing, I would be happy. Yeah, happiness as more, yes, exactly. So at seventeen, to have that and also to have awareness of that is amazing. I mean, Senegal's powerful place, I guess you know apparently. Yeah, it was facing west on the western shore. Yeah, looking back here, and I think I've never had that level of distance from America. I had been to Canada, just barely slipped across the Nova Scotia on a trip with

my mother. I had been to Mexico by training. Again with with my mother, we did some traveling, hit almost every national park in the United States. But to look and just see horizon and know that there's this massive place on the other side that's been the source of my identity, a ton of pain, some opportunity, and to feel a totally different energy and feel probably at some level safe. It's just a relief. Yeah, And having that having that perspective quite apart from the fact that I

don't know what is it. Maybe forty four percent of Americans don't have a passport, right and I almost didn't have my passport. I really dropped the ball. I had to do a name chain situation, and there was paperwork stuff. I was born with a different name that I had been using, and there was no This was the mid nineties, so it wasn't like just go to this website and it's like, no, just go to this building and wait in line. And we had to expedite it and it

came in just in time. It's very nerve wracking, but you did it and you got that, and then you had the awareness you weren't just swelling as Senegalese bear on the beach, Like that's an amazing thing. I feel like I read that your mother has been extraordinarily influential and that like this is apartheid was like the first book that she gave you or something. She laid really good ground for you to be seventeen and to be able to stand on that beach and have that that

epiphany or that awareness. Yeah. She she dropped me into the deep end of the pool. So when I stood alone in a wavy ocean, I was not afraid. Mm hmm. Wow, Yeah, that's my happy place to I don't have the same kind of story, but put me in the ocean. Yeah, water in the ocean and let the waves come. There's this rule. If I'm within reach of the ocean, I have to touch it. Yes, it's the thing I miss most about. I'm currently in London. I dream about the ocean.

I do have run every morning when I wake up through the beach where I live, and I touched this rock at every day, which is the end of my run, and then I jump in the sea right afterwards. That's powerful sea. It comes, but it's like it's so the specific and so not a sea like you called the sea all oceans of seas if you're English, it's weird because we're parochial and we have this very small like idea the sea. It's a big ocean, Yeah, exactly. Yeah,

ocean does feel orders of magnitude larger. It's like this epic scale thing, whereas the sea is surmountable in my mind definitely, But the sea doesn't have surf. To me, oceans, the ocean has consequence. The sea is like it's gentler and less less aggressive, and they have personalities because it's like the sea of this and the sea of that is, whereas the ocean is just too big to have a single personality. Yeah, the ocean, sea ocean, which actually makes

me feel safe. That power makes me feel like that notion of something more powerful than me in nature. It's always been that feeling. So you, this is your your unlocking something. I share that with you in that I've been drawn always to water, big water, hanging out in waves, really fun, big wind, and I loved and storms. I will go out into a blizzard. I recently went out

into a sandstorm. I like the feeling of in consequence, sometimes not as a permanent state, but the moment of feeling small, feeling buffeted, feeling held by this powerful force. It's very comforting to me. I wonder if it taps into like a reptilian brain, of that notion of connection, that you cannot be anything except completely connected to your

humanity and therefore your mortality. When you are feeling the power of things that could remove you if you didn't stay present and focus, or it just feels like the womb, the womb, the womb. My son said the other day, why is womb and all the hens? And I was like, because uterist just doesn't rhyme with anything. Well, it's true, and they weren't allowed to say vagina or any other part of a woman, only that life giving part of quote unquote was it for us? Let's just talk about

that womb exactly. The thing was finer than the angels. Stop stop me, stop me, you stop me. I'm going to stop you with it. I'm going to stop myself with another question. You have a lot of self inquiry about you. So what quality do you least like about yourself body? Okay? This changes over time. I've gotten to know my of better over time. That seventeen year old thirty knew himself. There was so much that kid didn't know so much, And hopefully I'll say something similar about

my forty three year old self decades from now. The quality about me that I like the least is my valuing of perfection, my devaluing of mistakes when I make them, my association of doing something wrong with being wrong. That's a really good distinction, by the way, learning doing wrong and being wrong. Yeah, why do you think we haven't?

It comes up a lot like I would say that in my life and talking to people and asking this question, they would they would say a version of perfectionism and mistakes. But why have we not figured out that the mistakes are what what makes us grow like we know that their mistakes make a scrap. We know that there is this actually incredible force that making mistakes has, like why why do we diss it so much? So there's a difference.

There are different levels of knowing. I know that mistakes are gifts and opportunities, that they are how I have learned some of my most valuable lessons. I know that perfection is worth pursuit but probably never achieved, and that is a feature, not a bug, of that attribute. I know all this. I know it in physics, I know it mathematically, I know it mentally. But then there's a level of knowing, which is being an existing and feeling and embodying. And I think that gap is a consistent

thing in many forms of knowledge that we experienced. Certainly that I do more to a tangible point. I think that I have had a hard time not judging myself harshly for all manner of mistakes, because I learned that from somewhere the simple answer why don't we do this? Somebody taught us, And maybe they didn't put it in a lesson plan and make us memorize it in drills in a classroom, but by some example or by some incentsive. We learned these things, So what has to happen in

the unlearning of it? Like when you're a thoughtful person, like I pay attention to my life, the lives of my community and my friends, and I listen. It's partly why I want to do this podcast, because I want to ask these questions of people. We know what certain things give us, and yet we don't let that change us. We don't let the unlearning happen. We just, at very best, maybe continue to make the mistake and have the awareness that it's a mistake, which is progress. Awareness is a

great it's a great achievement. So then patients with the pro says is perhaps our best ally. And you know, we are afraid. Sometimes I'll try to speak first personally. Um, I for much of my life wasn't aware that I carried this pressure. I felt the pressure, I didn't understand its source. And becoming aware of it it's like a

big thing. I think. I'm still becoming aware of how many places this shows up and like, oh, I thought I just really cared about how to use the spreadsheets, Like, but why do I care so much about how to put the stuff into the spreadsheet. Oh there's something going on here. You don't want to be judge, you don't want to be wrong, you don't want to fail someone else. Maybe, So even understanding myself and this fear that I have in this association with this part of me that I'm

not excited about, I enjoy that. I'm starting to enjoy that. I'm starting to say, like, oh, that's you, though, you you gotta know yourself. Man. And I love that guy, right. I'm I've been disappointed, I've been harsh with him, but also I'm like, that's my dude, that's me, right, Like, if there's one person to love in this whole world is me and and and to get better at that will help me do that with others. So I know that. Intellectually, I'm starting to feel that in my body. The change.

Change is scary. Change is why I've never done this before. I've it's been so rare. Can I Can I do it on demand? Could I become something where something different is normal? That's that's really scary and it's exciting. And I think what you said about patience is a big piece of it. And for this particular part of me, patience isn't natural because because patience means I'm not yet perfect. Ah, so I'm just making mistakes for longer? Is that? What

is that? What patience? Patience is being on the car Jo and be like, yeah, I long to it there? When am I going to get that? These are questions I'm still answering, practicing answering Can I shift? Can I enjoy the process that goes from mild discovery of hidden part of self to deeper awareness of that self? Two attempts to adjust how that self shows up to persistent love of that self no matter how that self shows up.

I mean that sounds great, That's very difficult. It's very difficult because circumstance, like the the wayward wild card in the pack of life. Excuse the whole analogy wayward wild card in the pack of life, but it is, it's circumstance. We can get all teed up with self knowledge and self love and patience, and then there's this this aspect which I don't know if it's spiritual, I don't know if it is scientifically based and it's purely energetic, or

if it's a bittle of both. But that that can come in and as I feel like we've seen in this past year everything can shift that we have no control of her, and in a way, all you then have is your connection to self and maybe the work that you've done in order to weather. There's those conditions. I mean, you say you love storms like last last year was a storm Like it was a quiet, creepy storm and sometimes loud and rambunctious, overwhelming storm. It was

many storms. Yeah, convergence of things creating a perfect storm. I don't know. I don't know if I go that far, but it's a fun word to use given what we've just talked about, I know, and interesting to see where it will where it journeys too. But I do think again, it's this awareness that you seem to have of your process and of your journey and learning to love the journey that's the thing. This awareness of self and patients with self and shifting away from judgment of self are

things that I preach about our collective self. Everything I just said about myself is something that I have a much easier time acknowledging about the collective me known as the member of the United States as a nation. It's like, oh, this is not a perfect place yeah, it's okay. We gotta work on it, though. We gotta work. So I'm like, you know, coach when it comes to seeing very clearly

and trying to be motivational, etcetera. And then when I shift that grammar a little bit from we to I first person collective, first person singular, and it's like, oh, now it's it's really personal. Now I get it, you know a bit more. This is doesn't come naturally to many of us as individuals or as collectives. I think it's work and that deepens my my empathy for the project yea, of just being for the project of being a human, poor sweet humans. And what relationship real or

fictionalized defines love for you defines love for me. I mean, it's very present. So my relationship with my wife defines love for me. And it does so because Ah, it's been such a loving lesson and experience. I used to imagine um and think of love as this like place you get to. It's like, oh, we we fall in love. We're in a state of love. We we've decided I choose you, you choose me, and we just kind of like coast, you know, at that point. But we're in love.

Therefore what I don't know. I just that's the only part that matters. But what is it? What does it mean? How do you experience it? And and what I have learned, not through reading anything or someone telling me anything, but through being in relationship is that it is an ever changing journey. And that kind of like the perfection thing we talked about. I think you pursue love and choose to commit to relating with another person in love, but you you don't rest in it. It doesn't you don't

stop because they don't stop. You know, my wife changes, she wants this, that or the other. She's learning about herself. She's a bit of a different person today than yesterday, ever so slightly, sometimes dramatically, but usually usually it's barely noticeable. But over years a person changes, and lo and behold,

I changed too. So if we've both locked in and said we're in love and then we both change, that, what are we now, right unless we're it's a process and listening to each each other and adapting, and it's a shared journey. I just I had the simplest idea of what love was probably imported from a lot of media, you know, painting these pictures and secondhand interpretations of pop culture and other people's relationships who I could observe from a distance, but if you're not in it, you don't

really know. It's like a person's mind. You can't really know it unless you're inside. And so, yeah, my wife Elizabeth, my relationship with her, I should say, defines love most of any relationship I've had, which is in part why she's my wife. Yeah, it's a beautiful journey, not always an easy journey, but that commitment and that then the knowledge that we're there for each other and growing with each other, giving each other opportunity to become more. That

feels like love in a much deeper way. Romance is different. Romance is fun, that's the thing. But I think it supposed to be is we're not. I don't think we're ever evolving at the same rate. Like there there's an acceleration that can happen in each of a partnership. It's life. My boyfriend can be on fire, I mean not literally, but you know on fire is just a regular occurrence,

like you see it, like it happens often. We would have all kinds of extinguishing but like he'll raise ahead and where he's at and again, whether it's circumstance or spiritual or whatever it is that I'm going through, I'm not in the same place. But you're right. Love is in the accommodation of where people are out in their journey, and it is amazing when you see them hang out and help lift you up or just hang out and wait.

It's all a journey. I mean, you and I could basically distill all of this into like really cool fridge magnets. I was thinking T shirts, but productizing regardless, definitely, but for sure we could definitely monetize our shared philosophy, which is cool. Which is the point of life. I think it's the point of philosophy. Yeah, certainly, money is definitely the point of philosophy. I think that Plato missed it.

He is too busy talking about, you know, the tyranny of democracy and he really need to be focusing on Like, yo, how can I make some T shirts for the promise of capitalism? How about that way? Now at the bright side, there, buddy,

be a human. Don't go into politics. Tune in next time for part two of my conversation with Baratunday Thurston Baratunday will answer, what question he would most like answered, What person, place, or experience most altered his life, and what in his life has grown out of a personal disaster. Many Questions is hosted and written by Me Mini Driver, supervising producer Aaron Kaufman, Producer Morgan Levoy, Research assistant Marissa Brown.

Original music Sorry Baby by Minni Driver, Additional music by Aaron Kaufman. Executive produced by Me Minnie Driver. Special thanks to Jim Nikolay, Will Pearson, Addison No Day, Lisa Castella and Annicke Oppenheim at w kPr, de La Pescador, Kate Driver and Jason Weinberg, and for constantly solicited tech support Henry Driver