YouSaid · the spoken record

Baratunde Thurston

lines on the record: 35
first: 2020-10-01
most recent: 2020-10-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And your business exists in a commons, not in a vacuum of a policy. And as that commons gets ruined, so do the prospects for your business. So I encourage the business American voter to think about the environment that they want their business to be able to thrive in and think about what a business likes, which is foresight, order, predictability, soundness and sanity. And think about the choices we have now. Who's going to provide more of that? Who's going to provide less of that? What's really good for your business? What's good for us?”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These things because they are distraction. They actually could be the path to increasing the value of your enterprise. The thing that I also say to my fellow business Americans is about this election. What we have before us is a choice not between like a Democrat and a Republican. I think we have a choice between an empathetic human being and a fully self-interested entity. We have a choice between right and wrong in a basic sense. A president is more than your tax break. President is more than some oversight rule that you can escape to get a few more points. On your valuation. The president is a leader, sets a tone, helps create an environment. We're in a very toxic environment right now. And it's not just because of the president. He's an accelerant, though. He's a clearly detracting from our commons.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're doing your inventory, that's the sort of question you can ask yourself, and then choose to use it. And it's not a one day thing. It's not a one-time initiative. It's not a Black History Month special. It's not Taco Tuesday. It becomes a part of how you exist. It becomes a part of how you citizen as a business. So if you want to be a person business, then be human and make mistakes too and recover from them and learn from them. Choosing to use your power affirmatively to make our entire community better is exactly what's needed. And it will probably accrue to you in measurable business long-term value, like customer loyalty, higher retention of your workers, like positive press and brand equity, and all of these things that you explicitly say you want, but maybe can't do that.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A business is seen as like a civic leader by default because we live in America and every business is already a more valued citizen than a human version, than a solely human version. We give a lot more breaks to businesses than we do to human people. So if black person shows up to city council and says, I think we should maybe reallocate the funding from police to mental health services. That's expected if a local business leader does that though. That's a pillar of the community. And we got to take that under advisement. Thank you so much. Who's going to listen to you where they would ignore someone else saying the same thing? That's”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have power in the chair that I'm sitting in right now, in where I choose to put my attention, which is with you right now, and where I put my money, you know, and how I spend it, but also what bank I give the privilege of doing shady things with it. A business has a long list of power, ways that it can use it.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think probably three steps to see if I can do this in three steps. Step one, I will quote my older sister Belinda, who wrote a great piece during this time called Tend Your Own Garden. It's very tempting to issue statements and press releases and turn your Instagram black and call out someone else for being wrong on a thing. But we all have our own work to do, and I think we're most powerful where we sit. Before you go marching out into the world, do kind of an internal assessment. You say Black Lives Matter, check your board, check your hiring practices, check your compensation schemes, and just understand yourself as a business. Where are you on this issue? Then I think there's a process that I'm starting to call a self-inventory of power. We have power in mostly where we”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“More seriously than they would someone who doesn't. And I didn't choose that. And it doesn't lessen me to acknowledge that if I don't let it. So I want us to get to a place where that burden, that educational explanatory burden becomes more distributed. We all have work to do in undoing and redesigning the imperfect system into which we were born. It's not all garbage, but there's a lot of garbage in and we need to clean it up. And I've got my own versions of white supremacy that I carry around that burden my sense of self-worth. A white person has a different journey, an Indian-American person has a different journey. A Latinx person has a different journey. So we all have work to do. And I hope that we all find ways to do that.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of this attempt to minimize us, putting it mildly. I think to my white friends and occasional colleagues who have these questions, most of me is glad that people are asking to live in a lie for one's whole life has got to be really hard to be raised without having to think about race is a great privilege, but it's also a burden when someone finally shares with you that this exists, that there's this whole system that's been designed in your name to do things for you that you didn't explicitly ask for, but you also didn't explicitly reject. And now you have an opportunity to explicitly use for some good if you choose to interpret the possibility that way. And as a man, I face it too. You know, I'm not just a top woke mountain alone dispensing wisdom. It's like, I think I'm pretty good at things, but also I have a penis and people take.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the people who are being burdened with answeringness, I try to remind my fellow black people and folks who are in similar situations to remember that we are more than our traumas and our vulnerabilities. And to look at the bright side. There's a beautiful architectural metaphor in the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. You start in the basement in like the 13 or 1400s and you climb your way through the slave trade through Jim Crow through lynching through mass incarceration. And you get to Obama. It's like we made it to Obama. And then you keep going in the upper levels, which I didn't understand and didn't leave enough time to explore. It's like all this beautiful culture that sits atop all this pain and trauma. It's just worth remembering to celebrate our existence and our resilience and our creativity in the face of”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You grow when you're open to the possibility that this person you're bringing in has something to teach you as well and may actually change your business for the better. Because what you define as a standard is actually pretty small because you've been missing a whole market. You've been missing a whole use case. You've been missing a whole type of talent because you didn't grow up with it. And you're seeing this other person as the impoverished one, as the one who's missed out on opportunities when you're missing out on an opportunity right now to benefit from their genius. If you would loosen up and let go and be open-minded, right? All the things you're expecting them to do to adapt to you. Maybe you should adapt to them some as well.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Clearly about to win the race. And he says, How do you know? Well, we look at right here. He's like, that's a snapshot. What if I told you that the runner in second position wasn't racing for the past hundred meters, but for the past 100 miles? Now, who's the better runner? Context matters. And there's a very simplistic attitude that I hear from my libertarian leaning and efficiency-minded and talent-first business friends, which is why I just want the best person. I just want the most qualified person. What are these qualifications? And are you taking someone's life into account when you measure them? And when you start asking that question, it can start to shift your whole talent assessment. The last piece on that is a lot of people who run businesses see it as a privilege to let someone into it. Well, I have the standard and you must meet it because you're lucky to work for me. That's not an exchange. That's not interconnected. That's not citizening.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you don't let yourself slide on it, your investors would never let you slide, where you just write off, maybe you declare bankruptcy and you fold the whole thing. Maybe that's your way out. But otherwise, you got to pay that back and you got to get out of that hole. And so that's the size of the moment. That's the size of the deficit. That's the size of the opportunity. And then what I say two more things. When it comes to recruiting, I hear the frustration of people, especially in very quantitatively assessing fields like law. We look at GPA, we look at school, we look at LSAT scores. And my friend George Fothery, he's a lawyer, and he shared this analogy with me. He shows a picture of people finishing a race. And they're right at the tape. Take a snapshot. And he asks folks, who's the best runner? And people answer whoever's closest to the tape. They're the best runner.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now you're just stuck in the hole. It's great. You're not digging a deeper one, but you're still really deep in the hole. You have to climb out. You have to generate that positive cash flow, that positive freedom, which means anti-racism, which means an active effort to undo the things that put us in the hole in the first place. And for the business person, I hope that translates because if you're, especially if you're a CFO, but if you're anyone who has any understanding of the numbers that power this, That is just true.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You still have this cumulative hole. So you're not really sustainable until you pay back those loans or those investors or those markets or wherever you got that money from that you leveraged into this moment. What I say to my business colleagues, fellow citizens, clients. The United States of America is in a very deep hole. We were built on a negative investment in freedom and justice for a really long time. And we don't get out of the hole by just”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I had a revelation when I was a strategy consultant doing a ton of discounted cash flow analyses on behalf of investor clients and telecom speculators or operators. What's this business worth? And we would do this cash flow analysis. I learned what cash flow was and I've learned how to make waterfall charts, which was super fun because they're called waterfall charts and I would have that song in my head. But I visually understood what it meant to build a business, especially if you're not making money in the early days. You're digging a hole year one, negative, year two, negative, year three, negative. And so you have this cumulative picture of a whole that's very deep. And then you start earning revenue, cool, net revenue better. So you're starting to climb out of that cumulative hole. And one day you make a profit on that day and you're like, whoo, we're profitable today.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I do get those questions a lot. And in my now less varnished place of being, I say a few things. To have a successful business right now is to have built it on a foundation of systemic racism. That's kind of an historical fact. It doesn't mean your business is super actively racist. It means it's as thrived in a system that was designed to be super actively racist. And so if you have difficulty finding talented black people to fill position X, On purpose, and we live in a designed space with hundreds of years of intention and effort behind it. There's no instant fix to that. One thing we need to do is to stop digging that hole. And in fact, Bob, you know, I'm thinking even more clearly about this because I'm remembering who your listener is.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Jump from Rush Limbaugh over to me. And I asked for that. And that's a challenge. So yeah, I'm not happy that their board is as non-representative as it is. I'm also not surprised. I live in a country that has terrible representation in the Senate of women and people of color and indigenous folks. And I still try to operate in that environment and make it better. It's a bit more of a choice around iHeart. They're like living in America, but there are some parallels for me. So yeah, thanks for the question. And I definitely thought about it. I was like, do I want to be on the same slate as Rush Limbaugh? And I think for this show in particular, that's kind of the point. Let's see what happens. And we're seeing what's happening. And a lot of people are getting exposed.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah. There's no perfectly aligned Choice available I went with iHeart because I knew they reached people that I wanted to reach with this message. It would have been simpler for me and more values aligned in one direction to go with a more explicitly progressive media outlet or something that felt and sound a little more like public radio. And I know that listener knows me and agrees with me. And that's not growth for me as a business. It's not growth for me as a citizen. It's not the highest version of the idea that I'm trying to live, which is to citizen, to connect with people who I don't always even agree with. And I looked at a company like iHeart that reaches everybody, almost literally, 94% of the country connects to iHeart. I'm like a daily or at least weekly basis. I'm like, well, that's going to be a challenge. Let's go. And I see it in the ratings of my show, right? There's people who.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And using it to create a healthier environment for all of us to live in and like buy soap and toothpaste, which, you know, is their goal.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Listen to FedEx, a global, powerful business that decided to use its power and say not in our name. It was instant. It moved at the speed of a FedEx package. You know, like talk about delivery. Talk about express overnight delivery. Bravo, it shouldn't have come to that, but it did come to that because money is power and they possessed a lot of it. I think where we've seen Facebook move isn't in response to individual consumers logging off of Facebook. The momentum on that machine is too big. But when the advertisers pull their money, they started shifting their policies and acknowledge a little more, adjust the thing a little more. They're used to being beat up in the press. They're not used to a company like Procter& Gamble saying we're just not spending money with you for the next month until you get this right. That's power. That's a company understanding its power with another company.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So that's part of what I'm saying. I grew up in Washington, D.C. with a football team that bore a very offensive name to the indigenous people of this country, many of them. And for years, they said, you got to change this name. And the team owners said, no. We will never change this team name. Mark my words. They're changing the name. And it's not because like I boycotted, which I started doing as a 16-year-old in high school in Washington, D.C. in the mid-90s didn't change anything. They didn't even listen to the indigenous people. They didn't have enough respect.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But also the trolls and the election interference and the still issues with privacy and abuse, it's so much. And so here's what I want, what I've always wanted with my show, How does Citizen with Barretunde is about is collective power. I think we still set up this system where we've allowed so much of these choices and this power to be in a literal handful of entities. And that's not small Democracy. I don't also think that's a healthy marketplace as we get more digital, more HD, more screens, more immersive, we've got to redistribute some of the way we make these decisions. And it's not something I can do alone. One person just saying no doesn't add up anymore. The forces are too strong. We only have strength together. And so we need some sort of collective way to represent our will and to balance out and have an influence over the decisions that are being made about us and literally with our influence.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At our own expense, sell us back to ourselves. Build a huge surveillance network, and then put a price tag on it, and then encourage one segment of the economy, marketers and advertisers, to drive all the innovation. And we, the consumers, the users, the products, we're not really invited to determine how we would be used. And that's one of the greatest flaws, you know, the internet visionaries in the beginning. Didn't that intend this, but when we pursued the narrow monetization strategy that we did, we made it almost inevitable. So I think we're in a tight spot because there's like I who am not a fan of Facebook have found myself so grateful for it in this time. And I'm like, oh, what I wouldn't give for a baby picture from a person I sort of knew from high school. This is great human, human.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the big tech platforms are saving us and destroying us at the same time. At the beginning of 2020, friends of mine who have kids were managing their screen time and mandating device-free moments and outdoor time. And some of them were sending kids to unplugged camps or detox camps. Some adults were doing that too. And we can't do that right now. Not really. It's our only connection to other humans and we need that connection psychologically much less financially. So we depend on Google, Amazon, Facebook, et cetera, et cetera. And there's still platforms of major problems. They were built with narrow intention, many of them were built to extract value from us.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And because we have worshipped business for the past several decades in a way that's a celebritization of entrepreneurship, of business leaders, of we need a good business person to run this city, county, country, what have you. And so we've built up the brand of business for a while. And now we're expecting things from in the same way that these studies say Gen Z and millennials expect brands to represent their values. We expect that more of us expect that from businesses too. And partly to backfill for the people who no longer do that and partly because I think there is something actually sound and natural about that.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think as a recent and narrow phenomenon, certainly my partner, Elizabeth, has spent a lot more time in the world of impact investing in social enterprise. And that's what she says to me. So I'm going to like trust her one that businesses as just money machines is something that is a result of a concentration of power, of a deregulatory environment over the past several decades of an increase in the dependence on financial services in our economy. And we might be forcing ourselves to return to a world where businesses are more active because in part we've like divested so much from our political system. We've defunded our political system in certain ways because the people who would normally show up to participate in their community are very busy working. The fastest growing jobs are actually the lower wage jobs. So people don't really have a lot of time.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think both can be true. I think it's always been there. And I'm 42 years old, so I have some sense of lived history, but not a ton. But I'm not a kid anymore either. And I seem to recall that there was an era where businesses were part of the community, you know, good corporate citizen, good small business member of society, main street business who knows everybody's name and supports the local Little League team and is supportive of the schools and is showing up at council meetings and not owning the town but participating in the functioning of the town and delaying those layoffs of those furloughs because you actually know the people who are affected by those decisions not moving the plant so the idea that business is just about money”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business possible. So a sane and rational market system is built on pillars of citizenship. We all got to show up. We all depend on one another. And so how does our whole society holistically provide for all of us? And I think For businesses and business owners. In fact, that's a necessary role. We can't achieve some of our larger goals without businesses citizening too.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To this global agreement to reduce emissions and save our only livable planet that we have access to for billions of us at least. So that's a good way to citizen. I think there's one other piece of this, and it came up in the episode, which is there is a short-term and long-term tension that happens with a lot of businesses, especially publicly traded businesses, especially those who, a term I recently learned from our guest, Michelle, from coworker.org. businesses that have been financialized. And so you're, you know, investors are just kind of harvest as much cash out of the business as quickly as possible versus creating long-term value. And to citizens is to build long-term value. And it is to work, of course, there's always tension with employers and employees, but without employees, employers don't have a business and vice versa. And without employees being compensated well and respected, they can't afford to buy the goods in a consumer-driven economy, which makes”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“From November of this year. And we were on a trajectory to kind of meet the goals that we had set to reduce by 25% our emissions by 2024, 2025. We were only down 16%. It's not on pace to make it, but we're closer than if we just fully stopped. And why is that? Why with an administration who clearly is not aligned with those goals and pulled us out? Is the US still managing to reduce emissions? One is the states stepped up, states and cities. Two is companies stepped up. And they said we're a member of a larger society. And we are stakeholders in this greater entity called Planet Earth, without which ain't nobody making money. So it's on us. And large and small companies have essentially signed on to this global tree.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Those principles can apply to any party, and including a collection of humans and ideas known as an incorporated entity. And so a company can go through that and say, well, how are we showing up? And how are we living in relationship with others? How are we understanding what our power is? And are we using all that to benefit the many, not just the few? Are we just maximizing a thin definition, a shareholder value, or are we taking in a holistic view of the stakeholders, of the employees, of the environment, of the families, of the communities that we're a part of? And there is a great way to citizen as a company. In fact, we're in the midst of so many challenges, but I listened to a report recently about the Paris Climate Accords, which the U.S. is scheduled to remove itself.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In physical numbers, we can spend money. We can generate and share ideas. We can, of course, vote in a technical political expression of power in a democracy. And the fourth piece is we do this on behalf of the many, not just the few, not just ourselves as individuals, but ourselves as members of a collective.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I so love that you ask this question, Bob. We live in a country where companies are considered persons. And so in a technical legalistic sense, a company can citizen. It is a member of society. It is a party. And in our most recent episode, I actually asked the question you just asked of me of our guests. How should a company citizen? So to answer that for you, I'll first lay out the four principles of what it means to citizen according to us. To citizen is to show up and to participate. It's an active thing, not a passive thing. To citizen is to invest in relationships, to acknowledge our interconnection and our interdependence. This is not a solo sport. It's a team sport. To citizens is to understand power where it comes from and the different ways we can use it. We can show up.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think I've had that part of me for a while. I did a very big TED talk about racism and white supremacy. And I worked in business for so long that I kind of understand some of their complexities from the inside as well. But in this moment, there was an intensity to how I showed up because there is such an intensity to where we've been as a country. It's not a normal time and it's not a normal moment and to have the largest sustained set of protests in the streets of the country ever has also happened in 2020. Like it's been a busy year. We had the greatest protest ever and Quibi launched. Like it's a huge year, Bob. It's huge. And so I've shown up a little more intensely and a little more. I can only think of it as like. Acapella or acoustic version of me”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's very connected. The businesses that ask me for advice and my being trapped in my home with an increasingly high quality studio, one thing I've learned is when you have great sound, you dominate Zoom. You just crush it. It doesn't even matter what you say. It's just like my mic is better than yours. And so you're going to subconsciously give my words more weight because they digitally have more weight. There's like a higher definition audio signal that I'm sending through. And same with the lighting and the camera. So these things that I, you know, in my advising capacity, I would show up and work the room. So because of the racialized moment that we're in the summer of 2020, a lot of these businesses were calling on me to talk about race. To talk about diversity and equity and inclusion.”
2020-10-01 · Masters of Scale · Rapid Response: Your company is a citizen – it can act like one, w/Baratunde Thurston · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT