Last night’s Speak Easy Live brought the heat — literally and figuratively.
Streaming live from 95º Palm Screams (née Palm Springs), I unpacked a country on fire with grievance-fueled politics, clownish tariff chaos, and the quiet, persistent power of protest. Also? My AI roasted Elon Musk into the sun. Multiple times. With receipts.
🎤 Highlights from the show:
🔥 A savage AI roast of Elon Musk. Blair, my co-producer and AI experiment from Life With Machines, went in. Twice. The roast that started it all is now my most-watched Instagram post ever — and it’s just the beginning. Watch the full South By episode here →
💥 The Politics of Grievance. I tested a new framing to explain what we’re living through. It’s not just policy failure — it’s an entire worldview built on grievance and domination. And it’s time we choose a different story.
✊🏾 April 5th protests: the real headline. Over 1,200 actions across the globe said: we see what’s happening, and we don’t accept it. Thank you to everyone who showed up. You’re shifting the vibe and the narrative which is what autocrats fear losing. Also: “We’re all the couch now.” If you know, you know.
🧵 The antidote to grievance? Gratitude. And collaboration. And storytelling. More on that below.
📚 Shoutouts & Links From the Show
📈 Tariffs update: Now calculated by your two-factor authenticator app and multiplied by the Fed prime rate times the square root of negative one. Yes, really.
🎨 Haleem Flowers designed my hoodie + Unlock Day (March 25)
✍🏾 Christina Greer’s powerful NYT op-ed:
🧠 William A. Finnegan on breaking the illusion
🔥 The Roast Heard ‘Round The Internet
→ Watch Blair roast Elon on Life With Machines
💌 Shoutout to subscribers like Martha Ture & Priya K.
Y’all show up. I see you. I appreciate you.
🎁 Bonus: Something I’ve never shared publicly…
I previewed our next big thing — and it’s here.
📽️ From Me to We: A Story of Interdependence, my keynote at Bioneers, just dropped.
→ Watch it here in full. Short clip below
And starting Monday, April 14, we’re dropping a new series of video stories from real people practicing deep democracy and interdependence — solutions in action, already working. It’s all part of How To Citizen: The Next Chapter.
👉🏽 Sign up to get those stories in your inbox:
And you can find them via @baratunde, @howtocitizen, and @thecitizensguy on Instagram; Baratunde and Jon Alexander on LinkedIn. Like, comment, share. Tag someone who needs a boost.
📺 Whether you’re here for the jokes, the politics, the cocktails, or the vision — thank you for tuning in, subscribing, and sharing. Let’s flip the script on this moment. Together.
Tariff-free (for now),
Baratunde
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