Baratunde Thurston Speaking Fee: $50,000 to $75,000

Baratunde Thurston is an Emmy- nominated, multi-platform storyteller and producer operating at the intersection of race, tech, democracy, and climate. He is the host of the PBS television series America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, creator and host of How To Citizen with Baratunde, which Apple named one of its favorite podcasts of 2020, and a founding partner of the new media startup Puck. Most recently, Thurston was featured in the Hulu original docuseries, Black Twitter: A People's History. In 2024, Thurston launched the video podcast Life with Machines, exploring the human side of the A.I. revolution—the good, the bad, and the weird. To help produce the show, he and his team built their own A.I. model named Blair to move from observers to practitioners of the technology. Through fun and enlightening conversations with entrepreneurs, artists, policymakers, technologists, business leaders, creators, educators, and scientists, Thurston seeks to demystify A.I. and answer the question, "How can these machines help us become more human? His comedic memoir, How To Be Black, is a New York Times best-seller. In 2019, he delivered what MSNBC’s Brian Williams called “one of the greatest TED talks of all time.” Baratunde is unique in his ability to integrate and synthesize themes of race, culture, politics, and technology to explain where our nation is and where we can take it. Baratunde serves on the boards of BUILD.org and the Brooklyn Public Library and lives in Los Angeles, California.