VAN:
It’s crazy to me that the people who don’t have the power but do have the purpose, in terms of seeking change, are over there by themselves—overlooked, underestimated. And the people who have the power to make the change aren’t attached to that purpose, that deep purpose of making society better. So if you take the people with the purpose for change, and the people with the power for change, you put ’em together, you have an unbelievable coalition. And then the whole world falls in love with that.
REID:
Hi. I’m Reid Hoffman.
ARIA:
And I’m Aria Finger.
REID:
We want to know what happens if, in the future, everything breaks humanity’s way.
ARIA:
We’re speaking with visionaries in many fields, from art to geopolitics, and from healthcare to education.
REID:
These conversations showcase another kind of guest; whether it’s Inflection’s Pi, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, each episode we use AI to enhance and advance our discussion.
ARIA :
In each episode, we seek out the brightest version of the future and learn what it’ll take to get there.
REID:
This is Possible.
REID:
Technology often starts small. A single line of code; piece of hardware; or laptop in a garage, dorm room, or lab. A few people with conviction. Early-stage nomenclature—seed funding and early adopters—reinforces this reality. Then with work, time, and luck, the product grows. The team grows, and the number of users grows. I can’t think of many cases in which a technology was truly immediately everything, everywhere, all at once. Even AI has had its humble beginnings decades ago.
ARIA:
That makes total sense. Technology grows as demand, interest, and conviction for it grows. However, there’s a challenge with this cycle, especially for general-purpose technologies like AI, which have a wide range of potential applications across many different industries and sectors. If general-purpose technology is built for many, but ultimately cultivated by far fewer people, how can we be sure that it’s built with the many in mind? This is especially critical for generation-defining technology like the internet, mobile phones, the cloud, and now AI.
REID:
Yes, technology defines generations as much as it changes the lives of individual people. Think about the origins of the labor movement in the late 1700s or the New Deal in the thirties. These were, in part, responses to upheavals in technology in society. With AI and its evolution, as well as the upcoming election in the US, we have a number of defining moments ahead. As the stories of AI and our next administration are written, how, when, and where can we include the many people who have a stake in these developments?
ARIA:
We hear about the bias, lack of access, and limited training sets in AI tools. There are many anecdotes about what comes from all of this, too. For example, I’m reminded of Trevor Noah’s story from last season about the AI that couldn’t identify Black women as easily as White women because of its preconceptions about makeup. We’ve learned that the technology can be fixed when these issues are surfaced, but how can we do that better and more quickly? How can we build AI such that all people are represented well and that all people can benefit? These are big questions, and today’s guest is thinking about all of these issues. He even received a $100 million grant from Jeff Bezos to address them.
REID:
Van Jones is the host of two CNN shows, a New-York-Times-bestselling author, and the co-founder of multiple social enterprises to address issues of criminal justice, climate change, and social equity. Those organizations include the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights—a nonprofit focused on justice and opportunities for urban America—and Color Of Change, a racial justice organization. He’s also partnered with CodePath, which helps low-income students train for careers in the tech industry.
ARIA:
Here is our conversation with Van Jones.
ARIA:
Van, it is such a delight to have you here. I’ve had the distinct pleasure of getting to know you over the years, and many of our listeners know your great work with prison reform and the green economy, but I wanted something new. So I asked a mutual friend of ours who used to work with you for some new material, and she said, well, most people know you as an activist, pundit, thought leader. You have a very creative side. So you’ve written interesting short stories yourself, and you have ideas for comic books. So can you tell us a little bit more about that?
VAN:
Sure. Well, I think that Afrofuturism, solarpunk, like, there’s certain aesthetics and cultural lenses that are gonna be required for us to make this leap into a completely different human civilization. I mean, that’s basically what’s happening. You know, I’ve got an 18-month-old baby girl. She’s going to live in a completely different civilization than what I was born into. You know, in five or six years, when she has a crush, it’s not gonna be a cartoon character or a rockstar; it’s probably gonna be an AI. How do you manage that as a parent? In 30 years, if she wants to have grandkids—for me, she could probably design them on a laptop. Like, that’s weird. Eighty, ninety, a hundred years from now when she—heaven forbid—when she passes away, she might be buried on Mars.
VAN:
So, that is a different human civilization than the civilization that I was born into. And by the way, she’s gonna be growing up on a different planet than the one I was born on as well, because at no point in my lifetime, when I was a child, was the North Pole hotter than the Sahara desert. And Texas froze. That was called 2021. It was a hundred degrees in the North Pole, 85 degrees in the Sahara desert, and Texas froze. So how do you prepare the next generation to live in that? You’ve gotta use culture, you’ve gotta use art, you’ve gotta—there’s an imagination gap between, you know, what people see every day with their lives and what they’re gonna be dealing with. And so I’m just passionate about using Afrofuturism. I have a media company called Magic Labs Media, and we’ve got ideas for a series called Afronauts Academy—not astronauts, but the Afronauts Academy—to get young Black and Brown kids excited about space. We’ve got a bunch of stuff that will be coming out soon. But, you know, if you want new facts, you need new fiction.
ARIA:
It’s so interesting, you know, growing up I was not really a reader of science fiction, and I thought it was just like funny stories that were being written. Like, I had no idea, honestly, until I met Reid and we started talking about what we read, that this, this is how you create the future. You know, sci-fi is fantastical, but it’s also talking about what’s happening in 10 years, or what could happen in 10 years or 20 years. To your point, Van, if we flip the script, and we let people dream, and we let new people into the future—and so it’s really opened my eyes, so thank you for that.
VAN:
The entire shorthand for the future is through science fiction. All of the people who are afraid of AI, they say Terminator or the Matrix or Robocop, right? All of the dystopian fears that people have are all translated through pop culture. And so, part of the challenge is those of us who are pro a positive future based on science, you know, we have very few things to point to. There’s Star Trek, there’s the Jetsons, and then, if you care about the communities I care about, Wakanda. Wakanda is the sort of example in pop culture of: What if science were in the hands of people who don’t ordinarily have it? What if they could use scientific breakthroughs and genius to make the world as they would? And so will.i.am and I have joined forces to do an event here in Los Angeles called Make Wakanda Real to get African Americans and our allies excited about what if, as Reid says, all this stuff broke our way? What if all this technology got to the community in a way that made every kid smarter, made every household more healthy, and created more opportunities for more people? What if we could make Wakanda real? But again, I can’t even have that conversation if there’s not a pop-culture reference. Thank goodness we have one in Wakanda.
REID:
Anything that you can share with us on a lens into making Wakanda real, that we can, you know, tease our audience with?
VAN:
I do think it’s important for us to recognize that—we talk about disruption, you know, people think we’re gonna disrupt, we’re gonna disrupt, we’re gonna disrupt. There are two things I would say about that. One is, let’s make sure we disrupt poverty. Let’s make sure we disrupt pollution. Let’s make sure we disrupt prisons, right? There are some systems that need to be disrupted. What I know is that nothing good happens for poor folks by accident. It really does take planning, intention, and purpose. So, you know, when we talk about disruption, let’s make sure we are including the systems that really need to be disrupted in those communities. But also, I think disruption reflects a particular point of view, or supports a place in time. You might feel like you’re disrupting right now, but from the point of view of people 20 years from now, 30 years from now, you’re not a disruptor. You’re a founder.
VAN
We are co-founders of a new civilization. That is a sacred task. That is a very big deal. Taking that seriously, I think what it requires is that the way we make change is going to change. For a long time, those of us, you know, for instance, in Black politics, we had a particular playbook. We’ve had it for about 50 years. Politics is the most important thing. Electoral politics, trying to elect good people. Activism is really important. Issues, policy, Supreme Court—it’s all been very state-oriented. Oriented toward trying to get the government on our side so that we can have a better shot. Well, the reality is now, power seems to be flowing away from states. I mean, like what’s happening right now in Congress and Washington DC is not very inspiring. They’re not gonna be able to regulate AI.
VAN:
They can’t regulate Twitter, handguns, or AK-47s. They are not gonna regulate artificial intelligence and biotech. That’s not gonna happen. The locus of where the future’s gonna be created is in technology. The future used to be written in laws. Now it’s being written in computer code. It used to be written, the future used to be written in Washington DC. Now it’s being written in Silicon Valley, Austin, Boston. When we talk about Make Wakanda Real, there needs to be an accord between these big AI companies and the communities that are usually left out. Whether you’re talking about Appalachia, whether you’re talking about folks who live in housing projects, whether you’re talking about folks in Native American reservations, the people who were left out and overlooked and underestimated in the old order, in the new order, let’s lock them in. So we aren’t just hoping it all works out. We aren’t just saying, “Well, the products will be out there. Everybody will have a tutor somehow. Everybody will get better healthcare somehow.” No, no, no. Let’s actually have an accord. But Velcro takes two sides to stick. Our community needs to be ready to have that conversation in a constructive way, in a positive way. And the AI companies have to be ready to receive that conversation.
ARIA:
So you hit the nail on the head in terms of what we wanna talk about today. So, when people talk about disruption in Silicon Valley, I think sometimes people recoil. They say disruption either A) My life is pretty good; I don’t wanna disrupt it. Or: Disruption, that’s gonna create winners and losers. And as you said, if we wanna help groups that have been left out in the past, or folks who are living in poverty, we have to be super intentional about our disruption and our changemaking. Can you say a little bit more of like, how does the public, nonprofit, private sector—like how do we work together to make this happen? Do we leave government behind? Or what are the first steps to get there?
VAN:
Well, look, I think it’s gonna be a, you know, a three-sided thing where you have, you know, community and government and the AI companies, but community voices need to go ahead and start moving. Government’s gonna get there late, last, and wrong probably. Look, there are assets, by the way, in Black and Brown communities that are useful and good for technology companies. The crazy thing is we get in this—what I call the pity trap, where people who hear about communities have been overlooked and underestimated, we show up with our deficits, with our pain, with our sorrow, with all the ways we’ve been done wrong. And we want people to then kind of relate to us on the basis of pity, as opposed to on the relationship, on the basis of partnership. How about we have a win-win partnership?
VAN:
You know what AI companies need? They need four things. They’re gonna need some help from government, or at least have the government not get in their way. They’re gonna need cultural adoption—people thinking they’re cool and not scary. They’re gonna need help with ethics and values because these are really big questions. And they’re gonna need a lot of molecules and atoms, meaning lithium, cobalt, et cetera. Now, Black folk got something to say about all four. It turns out African Americans have a lot of political power. Um, we’ve invested in politics for 50 years. So we’ve got a Black Vice President. We’ve got two Black senators. One’s running for President. We’ve got a Black governor of the state of Maryland, right next door to DC. The top five, the top 10 cities, seven of them have Black mayors. Houston’s got a Black mayor. Chicago’s got a Black mayor. LA’s got a Black mayor. New York’s got a Black mayor.
VAN:
Hakeem Jeffries runs all the Democrats in the House. We have a lot of political power. That’s an asset. We can come to the table with an asset, um, culture. I don’t mean to be rude; Black people are the Supreme Court of planet Earth for culture. If Black folks say it’s cool, it’s cool in South Korea. We are the absolute arbiters of cool. So there’s assets there to make this transition cooler, better, more fun, more engaging. Ethics and values—no deeper source of that than the Black church, in terms of the civil rights movement and all that sort of stuff. And of course, a lot of the rare Earth minerals are in Africa. So African people, African-descended people, can step to the table. We’ve got stuff, stuff that you need. Let’s make a win-win partnership.
VAN:
Let’s help each other help each other. That’s a much healthier basis to move forward on. And by the way, you can say the same thing for the Latino community. You can say the same thing for Native American communities. You can say similar things. And by the way, don’t forget, you’ve got a lot of folks in Appalachia and in the Rust Belt who vote for Republicans, but also who have a bunch of needs. You could have a blue, red, Black, White, and Brown positive coalition to solve these problems together with the AI companies, arm in arm. That’s how you build a coalition for good. And that coalition for good, the exciting part about that is you call it “the Next Deal Coalition.” Alright? And the problem that we have is that people in my community have been so traumatized, so hurt, so let down, so scarred, and so scared. We are very threat-sensitive.
VAN:
So Dr. King says we want equal protection from bad stuff. He’s speaking to that. We want equal protection from harm, from racism, from racist robots, from algorithmic bias, from all these different things. Of course, of course, of course we need all that. But Dr. King didn’t stop with equal protection from bad stuff. He also talked about equal opportunity, equal access to good stuff. How do we get an AI tutor for every poor kid? What’s the plan for that? Let’s sit down, let’s make that a real plan. How do we get Black mamas who are dying having babies—how do we use AI to fix that? Let’s not just talk about it. Let’s sit down at a table, design that, make it happen with these, you know, urban hospitals, these rural hospitals. Let’s sit down and do it.
REID:
One of the things obviously that will be important is trust building. What do you think would be the first—engaging in this conversation, bringing the areas that you describe is totally valuable. What do you think, if we were issuing a clarion call to the tech people—look, just do this, to start building trust—what’s the this?
VAN:
I’m sure that all these companies have put together ethical review groups, and they’ve tried to engage in that type of stuff. I would keep all that if it’s working. There need to be working groups at each of these companies that are deliberately engaging with the people on the frontlines of the problems. Not trying to fix the problems of AI, right? Communities right now are trying to fix the problems of AI. Now we also need AI to help fix the problems of the community, right? So just as you are, as we say in the Black church: Come just as you are. You may not have all the ethical stuff worked out. You may not have figured out all the, you know, gating this and the guardrails for that. But you got good stuff, and we got a bunch of problems.
VAN:
So while we’re helping you become more ethical, can you help us become more prosperous? And that kind of conversation. I think—first of all, I think a lot of people who work in technology, and AI in particular, would be stunned at how overwhelmingly stupid most of the systems are that determine people’s lives. If, you know, you take someone like Clementine Jacoby—Reid, one of your favorite people in the world—who created Recidiviz. It’s a couple of engineers from a high-tech background that said, well, look, I guess we could make another app for, like, photo sharing, or maybe, I don’t know, we could do something about the prison system. And so these kids wander off of, I don’t know, Google’s campus, somebody’s campus, and start trying to help fix the prison system, and are hit upside the head with the stupid stick of how dumb these systems are.
VAN:
People are literally sitting in there having served their sentence, and they’re there three months, six months, two years later because somebody lost the index card with their life on it. And so literally just bringing a small amount of engineering smarts—I think she’s gotten like 300,000 people outta prison. I mean, nutty stuff like that. So, you know, you take something. So when I talk about disrupting prisons, I’m talking about stuff like that. I’m talking about literally taking the genius you already have, the tools you already have. And even if it’s not gonna make a bunch of money right now, even if it might slow you up in a competition with China, just allocating some mindshare to people who are working on problems like that—more than anything else, that’s where you’re gonna have a breakthrough. And by the way, you are correct, Aria.
VAN:
A lot of people don’t want disruption ’cause the status quo is working for them. The best possible ally for technology that’s disruptive are the people who need disruption. It’s the people who need—the people that: I don’t like the status quo. You said that stuff’s getting knocked down? Hooray. God is real. Hallelujah. Change is coming. Thank you. Like, it’s crazy to me that the people who don’t have the power, but do have the purpose in terms of seeking change, are over there by themselves. Overlooked. Underestimated. And the people who have the power to make the change aren’t attached to that purpose, that deep purpose of making society better. So if you take the people with the purpose for change and the people with the power for change, you put ’em together, you have an unbelievable coalition, and then the whole world falls in love with that.
ARIA :
I’m so happy you gave a shout-out to Recidiviz. I actually met Clem for the first time just last week, and we had a love fest about all the amazing things they’re doing. So, they’re just freaking awesome. But I wanna give you an opportunity to shout-out some more amazing things that are happening. So there’s this powerful convergence happening right now, and you have founded, you’ve led, you know, four nonprofit organizations engaged in social, environmental justice. But—you knew we were gonna mention it—you also received $100 million from Jeff Bezos to deploy over 10 years to make the world better, to disrupt. And so, how do you assess the scale of this opportunity? Where are your strategic footholds? Like, how are you gonna do that?
VAN:
Yeah, it’s, when somebody says, it’s still a kind of a pinch-me moment. It’s still, I’m like, “Did that happen?” You know, because it was such a, such a dream. And it was, and I always remind people, it was Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez. Both of them are working on this Courage and Civility award. And it’s just a miracle because, you know, I think they both observed it’s easy to be courageous and mean, like it’s easy to be nice but cowardly. It’s really difficult to stand up and be very, very courageous while you’re trying to bring people together in this kind of age of polarization. So, you know, it was a—it was a life-changing decision that they made to give me and a couple of other people $100 million dollars of charitable money. Not money for me; I don’t have a new car.
ARIA:
I was about to say, where’s the Ferrari, man? Can you show us your stuff?
VAN:
No, no, I’m driving my son’s car that he left here when he went to college. And I’m staying at an apartment still, so I haven’t changed. But it’s amazing to have that kind of a capacity. And what we decided to do was, again, to try to disrupt prisons, pollution, and poverty. Those are the three areas that we’re working to disrupt. And one of the things that we did, we built an incubator to help companies, for-profit companies, that want to disrupt the incarceration industry. To me, it’s so important because having spent 30 years, as you know, working on criminal justice issues, I think we may have been looking at it in too narrow a way. We tend to look at criminal justice as a policy issue, a government issue. Um, the government passed the wrong laws. It’s a $90 billion-a-year industry.
VAN:
The incarceration industry is a $90 billion-a-year industry. Only about 6% of the prisons are private, but the whole thing generates, and runs through, $90 billion a year. And I think it’s time to disrupt that industry. We’ve seen the taxi industry disrupted by Uber and Lyft. We’ve seen retail disrupted by Amazon. We’ve seen hotels disrupted by Airbnb. We’ve seen dirty energy disrupted by solar and wind and electric vehicles. Let’s disrupt this industry. And the way you disrupt it is simply this: Competition, innovation, an alignment of financial incentives. So we’re organizing entrepreneurs, investors, and policymakers on the following basis: We think that you can bring crime down. I’m gonna say it again: Bring crime down. I’m gonna say it again: We can bring crime down. I’m not a part of the pro-crime lobby. Okay? I’m raising Black kids in Los Angeles. I’m not a part—I’m anti-crime.
VAN:
So we can bring crime down, rehabilitation up at a lower price point if we use technology, innovation, and financial incentives. For instance, you lock up a kid here in California, It’s $100,000 per year per kid. At the end of that year, you’re gonna have the same kid with new tattoos. That’s all you got for $100,000. What if I gave one Black grandmother and a tech bro the same kid and $100,000? What do you think they would do with that kid? What do you think the outcome there would be? Why can’t that Black grandmama compete with the incarcerated? Now listen: If the kid is a, is a terrorist or an ax murderer, the incarceraters might do a better job. But for most of these offenses, I’m quite sure that home confinement with some technology to monitor, plus a tablet that could give, you know, world-class education, maybe the weekends you gotta do some hard work, but you stay in your house, I think you could get a lot of lives turned around.
VAN:
I think you could save a ton of money. And you wouldn’t have to go into anybody else’s budget. So we actually have 10 companies that we backed. One of them is called Untapped Solutions. It used to be called ConConnect. Now it’s called Untapped Solutions. It’s basically a LinkedIn for formerly incarcerated people. And it uses AI to help people when they come home. You only—look, let’s just be honest: You’ve been in prison for five years, seven years, 14 years. You come home, you go on a job interview, you get rejected. Job interview. You get rejected. How many job interviews are you gonna go on before you finally give up? It’s not infinite. I don’t care who you are. And so the key with Untapped Solutions is they figure out—they use AI to figure out—where are you most likely to be hired? Look, if you, if you’ve got a burglary on your record, you’re probably not gonna be hired to install cable, okay? So don’t send them there. Don’t send people the places where they’re gonna get rejected. Simple, simple, simple. And yet now, I think Microsoft is a partner with Untapped Solutions. They’re doing really, really well. If you can break that revolving door so that when somebody leaves prison, they stay out, you’re disrupting the prison industry.
REID:
Totally awesome. And one little thing for their AI company, which is totally right: Another project that I work with is Byron Auguste on Opportunity@Work, and one of the things they found was the interviewing skills were actually, in fact, very handy. And that also might be something that’s pretty easy to do on the AI side—like, you’re just repackaging current AI. Just make it available in the right way to make it happen. And you know, you and I can follow up offline on those, ’cause totally agree with all the work you’re doing here.
ARIA:
And Van, another incredible person that you introduced both Reid and I to, who I didn’t wanna go another second without mentioning—because we have all of this AI, but many of the people who are creating this AI are White men—and we don’t see a diverse set of folks being developers, being engineers, and so I had the pleasure of hanging out with Michael Ellison and what he’s doing at CodePath, which is truly revolutionary. And, you know, while it is an NGO again, using market incentives, these companies want Black and Brown developers. Like, we need to make this happen. So would love to hear—why is CodePath one of the folks that’s on your shortlist?
VAN:
In disrupting poverty, which is, you know, one of the three, we said, “Look, these are trillion-dollar industries that are gonna be launched in our lifetime. Biotech, quantum computing, AI, you go down the list, you know, commercial space, I mean, these are multibillion, ultimately trillion-dollar industries, and they’re still way down early in their development curve. Now, if you can get on that elevator and ride with it, man, how far can you go? And oh, by the way, if you think of it as more of a rocket ship, if you get on that rocket ship, you might be able to steer it toward more or better outcomes as well. So you can both have a good positive impact for yourself if you’re a young person getting these industries and maybe for the world as well. But how do you do it?
VAN:
You need help. It’s so hard to do something or to be something you’ve never seen. The reason you see all these Black and Brown kids who want to be entertainers and sports stars is ’cause that’s what they’ve seen. So of course I wanna be a rapper. I want to be a ball player. I want to be Barack Obama. Whatever it is, it’s what you’ve seen. The great thing about what Michael Ellison is doing with CodePath is he’s helping schools that kids are going to already, like, you know, he’s not only helping like the Stanfords and MITs—God bless them—but he’s helping schools that working-class kids go to, often Black, often Brown kids go to, and he’s re-engineering the curriculum so that those kids can be successful in tech on those campuses. Because in the old system, there was a limiting factor on the campus, which is the number of kids that can be in upper-division classes.
VAN:
You only had so many great professors that can only teach so many students. So those introductory courses were brutal. You’re trying to wipe out as many kids as you can because there’s a limiting factor. You don’t have that many great teachers at the top. Well, who gets knocked out? A lot of women get knocked out. A lot of kids of color get knocked out. A lot of poor kids get knocked out. Not that they can’t do the work, but comparatively they’re slightly, slightly, slightly less competitive, and they get completely wiped out to zero. Well, what Michael Ellison does is he puts a jetpack on every teacher. So you don’t have to be a fantastic teacher because you literally have a jetpack on. You’ve got the curriculum, you’ve got all the information at your fingertips, so you eliminate that scarcity, and now more kids can succeed.
VAN:
And he also puts a jetpack on the backs of the students because they can, in a very guided way, catch up and keep up. And he’s just revolutionizing access to this technology education for kids who would otherwise be overlooked. If you want to disrupt poverty, the way you do that is you leapfrog people from the back of the jobs that are going away to the front of the line for the jobs that are coming, and a whole bunch of problems go away. We don’t have to engineer all these different anti-poverty programs if a bunch of kids from communities that you don’t expect them to are getting these tools, getting this education, and then bringing those benefits back home organically. That’s the power of CodePath.
REID:
So we’ve talked about the, you know, two of the important disruptions: Prisons. Critical, and you know, as you point out in various ways, just common sense for everybody. And then obviously poverty, which is also the case because the more talent that we have being productive, the better off we are as a society, not just in terms of health and happiness, but also in terms of economic prosperity. Let’s move to the third. What are your plans on the third platform of disruption?
VAN:
Well, as you know, climate, pollution, green jobs, you know, that’s a big part of my heart. You know, I worked for Obama as his green jobs guy.
REID:
Pi, could you explain?
Pi:
Van Jones played a significant role in the Obama administration. He served as President Barack Obama’s special adviser for green jobs in 2009, where he worked to create jobs in the clean energy sector and promote sustainable economic development. In this role, he helped to develop policies and initiatives aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions and combating climate change. He also worked to increase the number of green jobs available to Americans with a focus on creating opportunities for underserved communities. Overall, Van Jones was a key player in shaping the Obama administration’s environmental and economic policies.
VAN:
We’re now in this amazing moment where, despite some pushback and some blowback, the Biden administration has put literally hundreds of billions of dollars on the table to help this energy transition happen—from dirty to clean, from pollution to solutions. So the stuff that we were fighting for and marching for and working for in the early 2000s, that work is done. The money is there. There’s not a price on carbon. There’s some other challenges, but at least that big government investment is there. The question is: How do you get it to communities? One of the things I’m passionate about is: electric vehicles are really, really important for this transition. And in addition to the wealthy Tesla owners who got this movement started, God bless them, you know who really needs EVs now? Uber drivers, Lyft drivers. They need those. First of all, they drive six to 10 times more than me and you.
VAN:
So if they’re driving clean, it’s clean. If they’re driving dirty, it’s dirty no matter what you and I do. So the world needs them to be driving clean cars. But also, they can charge a premium if they’re driving an electric car. So they get a little bit more money in their pocket. So then they can put their daughter in a community college. Now they’re not just driving around in circles; they’re driving to a better place. But here’s a problem: Where are they gonna charge the car? Right now, if you’re in Brooklyn, if you’re in the Bronx, where all the gig workers work, there ain’t no charging stations. So you’ve gotta drive two hours out to JFK to charge for four hours to drive your car. It makes no sense. And so I’m a part of an effort called Obsidian, and we just basically did a bunch of matchmaking to get people who were putting in charging stations in the suburbs, which actually isn’t as smart because a lot of people can charge at home in the suburbs.
VAN:
Think about that. What are you doing in the suburbs? A lot of people, they can charge at home. But if you live in dense urban areas where you live in an apartment, buildings that are 20, 30-foot, and people can’t charge their cars. So you need the technology to be brought to those neighborhoods. So basically, long story short, we figured out that you could take some of those same companies, create a joint venture, and get them in our communities, and they actually make more money. Because people are willing to pay a little bit of extra premium to be able to charge at home, as opposed to having to drive out someplace to try to go hunting for these different charging stations. So these are the types of things that we’re trying to do. How do you deploy these clean-tech solutions into communities that might be otherwise overlooked?
VAN:
In Chicago, there are whole neighborhoods, they’re almost unlivable because you got one house with a good family in it, then two empty houses, then a house that’s burned down, and then you got a vacant lot, and you got another house, a house with a good family in it. And you can’t fix that. By the time you replace a couple of houses, it starts to gentrify. So it goes from being terrible to being affluent. And the people who live there never get the benefit. So you’ve gotta be able to replace those houses quickly, and you’ve gotta be able to replace them cheap. We found a company that was in Oregon making modular electric houses—modular, you know, in a way they snap them together like LEGOs. And they basically have like a battery in the basement, and they’re great, and it costs $250,000. You can make ’em in six weeks.
VAN:
We said, “Hold on a se. You’re making modular electric houses in Oregon? Why don’t we do that in Chicago? Why don’t we replace whole neighborhoods in Chicago with modular electric houses that the kids in the neighborhood can build?” ‘Cause you don’t have to have unions. You don’t have those laws. And so we are now on our way to replacing whole neighborhoods with modular electric houses, creating jobs for people coming home from prison, creating jobs for people who are unemployed in the neighborhood, supported by all the NFL players in town. This is the kind of stuff you can do. And we don’t have to wait for government to do it. We can do it directly. And so these are the types of things that I think are important. It’s a different model of changemaking.
ARIA:
I mean, it just reminds me of: Are we in a zero-sum society or not? Are we in a situation where if I win, you lose? And that’s what technology’s about. That’s what capitalism is about. The whole thing is let’s actually grow the pie for everyone. And so, you know, I love that idea in particular. Homelessness is one of the issues I care most deeply about. If we can build cheap homes that are also—it reminds me of Saul Griffith, who we had on the podcast last year talking about “electrify everything.” You know, can we have an electric water heater? Can we have an electric stove? It’s like, this is what we can do. And to your point, we have the government backing, and now it creates the market conditions for the private sector to come. I mean, another thing that you said, which is a—you know, a clear leg of the stool is: Black and Brown people are creating culture in our society. You know a little something about the media. I think the media is gonna have a large role in this. You know, whether they demonize AI, whether they, um, celebrate it. You know, we saw David Leonhardt wrote in the Times that, you know, #MeToo and Black Lives Matter, those movements have sort of not come to fruition like we wanted them to, even with a huge media spotlight. Like, where do you see the media playing a part, both in terms of AI and sort of the new evolution of change that we’re all looking for?
VAN:
Well, right now it’s a jump ball, and it’s a lot easier to tell the scary story than the hopeful story. And frankly, it’s a lot easier to oppose something than to propose something. And so that’s why those of us who really believe in this stuff are gonna have to work really hard. You know, there’s only so long we can say, you know, it’s gonna help poor kids, and we have no plan for it to actually help the poor kids. So we gotta get ahead of it. So when we say it’s gonna help poor kids, we can actually show the poor kid it’s gonna help. That’s gonna be the key with AI. But you know, here’s the thing: If we do the work, then, you know, we have the stories to show. I mean, the key here is we will get our card pulled.
VAN:
So for instance, there’s this whole thing in AI, talk about having a human in the loop, having a human being in the loop. And for some people that feels comforting. That assumes that the human in the loop is a good human and assumes a human in the loop actually knows anything about you. So I say we don’t want just people in the loop. We want peoples in the loop. We want Indigenous peoples in the loop. We want African peoples in the loop. There are whole peoples whose way of knowing, whose way of seeing things, who could get left out or could get locked in. Let’s be aggressive about that. We wanna make sure that we have a lot of data, but we also have a lot of wisdom. Data plus wisdom combination requires peoples in the loop. And so, um, those are the kinds of things that, when we do that, that’s mediagenic, man; Native Americans sitting down with White tech bros and, you know, figuring out how to use, like—there’s stuff that’s cool, man. Like, if we do cool stuff because it’s good for people, it’s also good for the media. Um, there’s a way that we could create a synergy here that makes it very, very difficult. There’s a group called Old Ways, New that’s Indigenous people thinking about AI.
REID:
One interesting follow-up on this, you know, from not your home industry but your hometown; you know, obviously the kind of the world has watched the writer-actors strike on AI, and yet you think about how AI could be amplifying what you’re creating in media and so forth. And maybe this disruption will allow many more peoples, we hope, you know, into this. What’s some of the things that you’re kind of lensing forward, hoping to see from the use of AI to changing the, kind of, media landscape? Not just the stories about it, like exactly, you know, as our earlier conversation with science fiction, but the use of the technology to be, you know, more peoples in the future.
VAN:
It’s so exciting because Hollywood needs to be disrupted. There’s a guy named Alex Rivera, a Latin filmmaker. This guy is brilliant. He wrote, he did a film called “Sleep Dealer.” It’s a sci-fi from a Mexican point of view and basically, in that reality, they built a wall at the border, and they basically strap Mexicans into these devices where they operate robots on the other side. So they have the labor of the Mexicans, but not the bodies, not the presence. So that’s the context. It’s a brilliant film. It’s a brilliant film. He has an idea for something called “the mezzoverse.” In that reality, you know, maybe, the colonizers got repelled, but it bumped the Aztecs into a particular position where basically the Mexicans are first in space. He used Midjourney to image that.
VAN:
What would it look like if Mexicans and Aztecs and Mayans had got to space first? It is so beautiful. It is so stunning. And you, I mean, you just see some of these pictures. Without Midjourney, he’d have been wandering around this town trying to sell this mezzoverse idea forever. Because when you just say “Mexicans in space,” you think, ‘Oh, is it a comedy? What are you talking about?’ But when you see it, he was able to, over the course of a weekend, create these images—that’s now creating this whole conversation in Hollywood. This guy might wind up being the Latin James Cameron or the Latin George Lucas because he was able to get his vision seen without having to raise $10,000 or $100,000 or $3 million or $5 million. You’re going to empower so many people who could not get this town to listen. And frankly, a lot of these people, you don’t need ’em, guys. You can just make your stuff, put it on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube and go out about your business. And if it’s awesome, people will find it anyway.
ARIA:
I wanna go check that out. That’s awesome.
VAN:
Yeah. Coming soon.
ARIA:
Absolutely.
REID:
One of the things that we should also talk about, ’cause it’s very important, speaking of peoples in the loop: Going into 2024, one thing I’ve been thinking about is say, only a loser would say that, you know, a presidential election can be stolen under their watch with a Republican Senate in states that have Republican secretaries of state in an election and a bigger loser then claims that the election was stolen, ’cause, ’cause only a loser could do that. But that’s gonna be really fugly, ’cause there’s gonna be a whole bunch of people who think that they need to engage, unfortunately, with, like, violence—like the January 6 stuff is gonna be a garden party. What are the ways we should be thinking about it? And what are the ways that we should be navigating this, and, how do we, you know, care for America in this?
VAN:
You know, I just got back from Tennessee, my home, my actual home state. I was shooting a documentary down there for CNN about politics in the red states. You know, people are hurting and uncertain across the board. On the kind of Trump side, you have people who are managing a stolen past, an unstable present, and a stolen future, I think. That’s how they’re experiencing things. They grew up thinking America was great, perfect, and wonderful. These liberals wanna come and say it wasn’t: You’re stealing my past. You wanna take down these statues. You want to talk about slavery. You’re stealing my past. And the future, the present feels unstable because of inflation, because of all these cultural changes. You know, people look, the old folks’ homes look like Switzerland, and the kindergartens look like the UN, and it’s confusing.
VAN:
Like, what is this? You know? Change is hard. The future, whatever the future was supposed to be, it’s not coming. That’s a problem. People who have better ideas about how to give them the life that they want and more hope, ignore their pain. We say, “Look, screw you guys. You’re a bunch of older White dudes who’ve had it your way the whole time. You know, quit your bitching. Make room for other people.” That’s not as good a sales pitch as you might think. “You suck, follow me” just may not be as persuasive as, you know, our progressive friends think. And so I think you’re gonna see real intensity on their side for their guy. But what I say—I never have a problem talking to MAGA people, as you know. I feel quite, quite comfortable talking to them. I just talk to them differently.
VAN:
I just say, “Look, here’s the deal. First of all, let’s just be very clear. I’m a Black activist. I used to work for Barack Obama, and now I’m on CNN. Okay?” So three strikes. I’m out. You know who I am. I know who you are. We don’t have to go through any nonsense here. And based on that, uh, you might think that I’m mad at you and you would be correct, but not for the reason that you think I’m mad at you ’cause I need you. You’re some of the best people in this country. Many of you are veterans, like my dad. You know what it means to stand up for something. Many of you are union members. Some of you are small business owners. Some of the best people in this country. But I could put you in a car right now, sir, and I could take you in 20 minutes to an American community where American kids are going to bed hungry. American children.
VAN:
And where the hell are you guys? I can show you American children who’ve never met their father ’cause their dad is in a graveyard, or he is in prison ’cause he did the same drugs your kids are doing in college right now. And where the hell are you guys? These kids need you. They need your strength. They need your values. They need your integrity. And by the way, you need these kids. They’re some of the most creative, amazing kids. Yeah, America’s grandchildren look different than America’s grandparents. But they’re still America’s kids, and they need you. And by the way, stay in your party. Don’t come in my party. I got enough problems. You fix your party, I’ll fix mine. But what are we gonna do to help these damn kids?” And I’m telling you, those guys would follow me into machine gunfire. And I’d follow them. Because I’m not calling them out.
VAN:
I’m calling them up. I’m calling them in. The pain that my community is going through—Black folks, Brown folks, broke folks—is the same pain. Our future’s been stolen too. We don’t, we thought things would be better by now. We want a better future too. Can we have a positive populism? I don’t want to have a negative populism where I either gotta hate the billionaires to be with the left. By the way, not only is Reid a billionaire—I love you Reid—but you know who else is a billionaire? Oprah. I gotta hate Oprah to be in your movement? We just got some Black billionaires. Now I gotta hate them too? Nah. I can’t be with y’all. No, I’m sorry. So I don’t wanna be in a movement where I gotta hate billionaires. We just got a couple.
VAN:
I don’t wanna do that. I don’t wanna do that. Or I don’t wanna be in a movement where I gotta hate immigrants or Muslim people. Those are negative populism. What about a positive populism that’s not based on problems and blaming people, but it’s based on solutions and working with people to get there? If we offer people that, I think more of them will either come, or at least they won’t try to kill us. And I’ll take either one. But for me, I think people are gonna be very surprised. People are hurting and uncertain on both sides. The job report is good, but the jobs suck. People can’t, I mean, it’s embarrassing; people are being humiliated in front of their children because when that check-engine light comes on, they can’t fix it. I know it sounds crazy. It’s corny. Nobody wants to hear this.
VAN:
But I’m gonna tell you right now: Showing up with positive solutions. Showing up with “I need you.” Showing up with “we can do it.” Showing up with “I love you no matter who you are.” You’re in jail, you’re in prison, you did bad stuff: I love you. Nothing you can do about it. You voted for Trump? I love you. Nothing you can do about it. You voted against me every time? I love you. Nothing you can do about it. Showing up with that I think is the only way out of it. I don’t think we can divide our way out of it. I think we gotta unite our way out. I think we have to unite our way out of it.
ARIA:
I mean, Van, you are, you are preaching to my choir. I have goosebumps. And I think to your point, this is the first time in 70 years when the majority of people won’t do better than their parents. For all of us liberals to say like, “Oh, things are great. We’re just moving ahead. We’re moving positively.” Like you have to understand where people are coming from, and, to your point, meet them where they are.
REID:
Our first rapid-fire question: Is there a movie, song, or book that fills you with optimism for the future?
VAN:
I like this gospel group called Maverick City. It is a bunch of kids. I call ’em kids ’cause I’m in my fifties. A bunch of young people who somehow started writing these gospel songs, many of them as a live improvisation. And it is stunningly beautiful stuff. They just won a Grammy, I think, this past year. But it is the way I imagine the early Christians must have experienced just the rapture of feeling emancipated in their souls, that there’s something more than just this life. And they look like, you know, they’ve got tattoos and piercings, and they look like a bunch of urban kids that should not be singing Jesus songs. And yet, anybody can listen to that stuff and be moved. If you can listen to that stuff and not be moved, go get a heart transplant. Something’s wrong with you. So I would say anything from Maverick City.
ARIA:
So this question can be silly or serious: What is the question that you wish people asked you more often?
VAN:
Maybe where I’m from, because I love talking about being from the edge of a small town in the middle of a red state. I think people think I was like born in the Obama White House or born next to Anderson Cooper on CNN or something. You know, I wasn’t born at CNN. I wasn’t born, you know, at Yale Law School. I was born in Jackson, Tennessee, on the edge of a very small town. My parents were born in 1944. They grew up in real segregation. People act like, “Why do you guys keep talking about segregation? Wasn’t that a thousand years ago?” No, I’m sorry. My mother and my father were born in segregation. My mother and my father were married under brutal Jim Crow, colored-signs segregation.
VAN:
I was born in 1968. I was the first person in my family in nine generations here in the United States, nine generations, the first one born with all my rights recognized by the government, ’cause those final bills were passed ‘64, ‘65, and I was born in ‘68. So, you know, it’s important for people to realize this is not that long ago. You know, I come from a county where the difference between rich people and poor people, probably about $40,000 a year. We all went to the same public school, and we got along: Black, White, so-called rich, so-called poor, Democrats, Republicans. So I don’t have to guess—I know that you can vote against somebody and still love them. I know you can go to a different church, have a different skin color and still love them. That’s how I was raised.
ARIA:
So Van, this is our final question. And to be fair, you’ve been answering it all afternoon. But I will give you one final opportunity, which is: Can you leave us with a final thought on what you think is possible to achieve if everything breaks humanity’s way in the next 15 years? And what’s our first step in that direction?
VAN:
I think we can shock ourselves. First of all, I think people should see themselves consciously as co-founders of a new human civilization. That’s what we should sign up for. We are co-founders of a new human civilization. You know, Dr. King is really misunderstood at the March on Washington in 1963. I got a chance to go and be one of the people who gave a speech in the anniversary this year. Dr. King was the final founder of a democratic republic. It took 200 years. It wasn’t like, like 1776, we had a democratic republic. We had a slave state on stolen land. And then a hundred years later, we had a civil war to get us to apartheid. Okay? That was what the Civil War gave us: Apartheid for another a hundred years. It took 200 years.
VAN:
But the final founders were Dr. King’s generation. You know, Ella Jo Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer and Bayard Rustin and Diane Nash and John Lewis and Dr. King. They were the final founders of a democratic republic on these shores. And Dr. King was the most consequential Afrofuturist ever born because he said, “I have a dream.” A dream is a vision for the future. It’s about tomorrow. So you had the most consequential Afrofuturists standing there in front of the country. That was the final founding. But that order is now going away. We may not even have nation-states. We don’t know what’s gonna happen. So we’re creating a new order. We’re co-founders together of a new civilization. And that should give people a lot of hope. That should give people a lot of pride. The decisions we make together in the next 10 to 20 years will determine the whole destiny of humanity.
ARIA:
Van, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate it.
REID:
Possible is produced by Wonder Media Network, hosted by Aria Finger and me, Reid Hoffman. Our showrunner is Shaun Young. Possible is produced by Edie Allard, Sara Schleede, and Paloma Moreno Jiménez. Jenny Kaplan is our executive producer and editor.
ARIA:
Special thanks to Katie Sanders, Surya Yalamanchili, Saida Sapieva, Ian Alas, Greg Beato, and Ben Relles. And a big thanks to Rae Steward, Gus Alexander, Andi Lichtenfeld, Belicia Montgomery, Kalia Lydgate, Didier Morais, Chantel Muentes, Felicia Shand, and Little Monster Media Company