An Army of Normal Folks - Vanessa Elias: The Block Party Revolution (Pt 1)

Episode Date: November 4, 2025

When Vanessa Elias saw a rise of incivility in her Connecticut town, she rallied citizens to host 40 neighborhood block parties that had 1,200 attendees, so that people can get to know their neighbors, realize that they don’t hate them, and even enjoy them. It got so much attention that she started Block Party USA to spread this simple solution across the country! Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I had a third brother, or third child, the second brother, and he died three days later. He was born with half a heart and had surgery that didn't save him. When my parents came home from the hospital, pulling in the driveway with the wood-paneled station wagon and just their faces, right, red-eyed zombies, I ran to Mrs. Gilliam's house. She held me on her lap and rocked me and told me about cherubs and that Justin was an angel in the same. guy, to have, like, you know, another adult that a child can run to, literally run to for support locally, is just so meaningful and so important for parents, for families, for kids, for everyone. And that obviously had a big impact on my life. And boy, have we lost that today. Welcome to an army of normal folks. I'm Bill Courtney. I'm a normal guy. I'm a husband. I'm a father.

I'm an entrepreneur. And I'm a football. football coach in inner city Memphis, and that last part led to an Oscar for the film about one of my teams. It's called Undefeated. Guys, I believe our country's problems will never be solved by a bunch of fancy people in nice suits, talking big words that nobody ever uses on CNN and Fogs, but rather by an army of normal folks. That's us. Just you and me deciding, hey, you know what, maybe I can help. That's what Vanessa Elias, the voice you just heard, has done. Vanessa has lived in 28 different places across the world, which has especially taught her the importance of neighbors and community. And when she saw a rise of incivility in her current community of Wilton, Connecticut,

she rallied citizens to host 40 neighborhood block parties that had 1,200 attendees so that people could get to know their neighbors. realize that they don't hate them and even get this enjoy them got so much attention that she started block party USA to spread the simple solution across the country i cannot wait for you to meet Vanessa right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors Bobwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way.

And why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse? He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionous History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark.

I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturno? Tales from the Shadow. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I've experienced the horrors to have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Michael Lewis here. My book, The Big Short, tells the story of the build-up and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely, but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Eisman. We fed the monster until it blew up.

The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release, and a decade after it became an Academy award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The Big Short Story, what it means when people start betting against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics. Get the big short now at Pushkin.fm.fm slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold.

I'm I Belongoria, and I'm Maite Gomezrejoin. And on our podcast, Hungry for History, we mix two of our favorite things, food and history. Ancient Athenians used to scratch names onto oyster shells, and they called those OsterCon, to vote politicians into exile. So our word ostracize is related to the word. Oyster. No way. Bring back the Ostercon. And because we've got a very My Casa is Su Casa kind of vibe on our show, friends always stop by. Pretty much every entry into this side of the planet was through the Gulf of Mexico. No, the America. No, the America. The Gulf of Mexico, continue to be forever and ever.

It blows me away how progressive Mexico was in this moment. They had land reform. They had neighbor rights, they had education rights. Mustard seeds were so valuable to the ancient Egyptians that they used to place them in their tombs for the afterlife. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.

32 lost nuclear weapons? Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow.

Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcasts we were doing. Nick Kroll, I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Vanessa Elias, welcome to Memphis. Thanks for having me. Vanessa Elias is the founder of, of Block Party USA. She's from Wilton, Connecticut, and was kind of enough fly down and join us, fly down last night,

listen to some poetry, avoid the paper tag, driving idiots, and enjoyed it. I got to take out the BB Kings, and took it up to the rooftop. Pretty cool place. Yeah, it was great.

Good. Well, I'm glad you enjoyed a little bit of our fair city. You're not far from the National Civil Rights Museum, by the way. Yeah, I wanted to go there, but they were closed by the time. go then.

Was it? Well, that's probably Alex's fault for not scheduling properly. So, founder of Block Party USA, certainly we're going to get to that. And I found reading about your childhood really interesting and certainly germane to the whole block party focus, I think, which I don't want to put words in your mouth. You can explain that. But you and I studied the same thing in college. Oh, yeah?

Yeah. And I think I want to start. there with you to give our audience a perspective. And then we'll go back to your childhood maybe. But I think both pieces offer really interesting perspective on why you've done what you've done and how success you've been. And by the way, it's really, really cool. And I can't wait to kind of unfold it for our audience. But start with what you studied and kind of what that led to in your world after your childhood,

which then we'll double back and go to that. So I studied psychology, but only as undergrad. I never went further with that. And I also had a minor in German, of course. That makes total sense. Oddly, my degrees are in psychology in English. So there you go. I couldn't speak another language.

I'm not good at that stuff. So go ahead anyway. And so I think psychology was always of interest to me, and it's trying to figure out how the world works, how people work, and understanding where people are coming from, what causes them to be the way they are. things that we can do to impact our well-being. And, I mean, I just, I loved it.

It was a lot of fun. And then I never, like I said, and then I went into marketing and use that psychology. Actually, psychology makes sense in marketing. But I think it's interesting. I think you have people that struggle with some mental health issues in your family. Yeah. Tell us about that. So growing up, I think that was really, I didn't have the family life quite I wanted.

I mean, from the outside, everything was great. But there was a lot of volatility at home, and I didn't really feel like I belonged and didn't feel connected and struggled to understand that it wasn't about me, right? It was about the other person and the things that they had struggled with and trying to, you know, make sense of it all. Stuff. My dad left when I was four. Mom was married, divorced five times. And I'm pretty sure that my going into coaching and psychology was also a result of kind of me trying to figure out who I was and where I fit in the world. So I found that interesting.

But in addition to everything else, don't you run a support group or something that kind of came to – tell us about that. I do. But I'll just say one more thing about college. I remember – I found some old papers that I had written, you know, typed up. And I was blown away because what I had written was how I wanted to help parents. and understand their impact of a child's self-esteem. Did you feel like your self-esteem was negatively impacted? Yeah, yeah. So your answer was not to be a victim but was to fix it for other people?

Yeah. That says a lot about you, don't it? It's very cool. Thanks. So tell me about the support group thing. So support group is with NAMI, National Alliance on Mental Illness, which is a nationwide grassroots organization with local chapters. And when we were abroad for six years and things were really hard with one of my child's mental health issues and was part of the reason we came back to the U.S., we just weren't able to get the support we needed.

And I had struggled in silence for so long that when I came back to the U.S., I knew that I needed to speak and I needed to find other people who were experiencing this. So I had said to a friend, I need something like Al-Anon, but for mental health. You explain what Al-Anon is for people who don't know? Yeah, it's for loved ones of people who suffer from alcoholism. Right. And so it's like part of the AA world. It's the people who are really the victims of the folks who are in AA. And they're struggling, yeah.

Right. So I was just so lucky that she'd heard of it. And she said there actually is something that's called NAMI. And there was a meeting once a month, you know, 30 minutes away. and I went and I felt like I was in a room with people who understood the things that we couldn't speak about outside. And so it felt like just understood and that there was a world and people, you know, it wasn't my fault. Right. So it was, yeah, I'm tearing up because it was really meaningful.

And so then I got trained, like once I felt like I was on solid ground and got the help that we needed, I got trained to be a facilitator. And I started that. I think it was about two years later. And I've been doing it ever since we're running a monthly group. We were in person. Now we're online on Zoom. So it makes it easier for people to join. So once a month. And it's basically parents of or caregivers of kids who are struggling with emotional and behavioral mental health issues with a diagnosis or with not. We generally say kids who are 21 and younger. So it really ranges from. seven-year-olds too. I mean, there are still people who come with older kids because they've been coming for, we've been doing it for a long time. It's our 11th year. So, you know, kids are older that are still struggling. But it's a safe space where you feel understood and you don't feel judged. So, and you can find the resources, right? And you get a support from other people in the group or, you know, things that worked or things that didn't or, you know, just a space where other people understand. Well, this is not the topic.

of our discussion today is about block party it's not about this i think i think as i read about block party how it's so much more important than just having a party i think that that experience of going to school and studying psychology and what we're about to unpack your childhood and then what you've done since then i think it's all kind of part of the same bucket, don't you? I agree. Yep, it is. So let's explain that a little bit. And you've alluded to it. I'll just set up what Alex told me.

You rarely ever listen, so this is nice. Well, this is crazy. You've moved 28 times, lived in eight states in four countries. True. And you were always trying to fit in and belong and be part of something. And you were always the new kid of the new family. and the minute you started subtle, it's time to go again. That lack of consistency and lack of connectivity had to have been really difficult.

So why? What were y'all running from? I mean, I want to say it sounds like a military family, but I don't know. Unpack your childhood. Tell us about all of that. Because, again, maybe it doesn't seem on the face of it, block party has anything to do with this, but I think it has a ton to do with it once we

understand more. Definitely. I've come to understand that myself. It was actually Jenny Wallace, who's author of Never Enough, who pointed out to me. She said, you're like a community architect because of you're always looking for community as a kid. And it never, it was so obvious, but it had never hit me. Yeah, it's pretty obvious. Right? It's like, it's obvious. So my dad Dad was in, he had gotten a scholarship to Penn State as a kid. He grew up in a steel mining town and he, in Pennsylvania, and got kicked out. She played too many cards. And so I had to enlist in the military and was lucky that he had taken German in high school.

And so instead of Vietnam, he was sent to Munich, Germany. And there he met my mom, who's German, and worked for the German Secret Service. Are you kidding me? This is so cool. So your mom worked for the German Secret Service, and your dad's a smart dude, but played too much as in the military in Munich. And that's where they met. That's where they met. Okay.

Had me. Yeah. Got married. Yeah. Then moved back to. In that order. In that order. You got it.

My dad was 21. My mom was 24. Wow. And moved back to the U.S. when I was two and a half. and went back to Penn State, got his undergrad, and his MBA. Wow. Okay. So then?

So then he, like in our first home in State College was a trailer. So we lived in a trailer park while they, you know, my dad went to school. My mom worked, watched me. Hold it. A German woman from Munich from the German Secret Service posted up in a trailer in State Park. Yep. Okay. True love, I guess.

That had to have been a little bit of a culture shot. For her? Well, I don't, you know. She had a rough childhood. Her mom died when she was really young. Her dad remarried. They were from northern Germany, actually, and she had moved down to Munich to be with her dad. Like Hamburg?

North of Hamburg. Mm-hmm. Well, you get north of Hamburg. You're almost in Sweden. Totally. Yeah, near Denmark, yeah. North Sea. Over by Silt or something like that.

Yes, the island. Do you like that? Yeah. I've never been, but I'm pretty impressed. Yeah. Thanks. Okay. So go ahead.

So, anyway, lived there, went to school, lived off to school, lived off the gym. GI Bill and then moved to Michigan to work with Ford Motor Company and then Missouri. Were you pulling your house behind you or were you living in Brexit? We had a solid small brick home in Michigan. That's where my brother was born there. Got it. Keep going because we're talking 28 times eight states and four countries. So it was, which actually last night when I saw the Mississippi River, I was like,

I think this is the first time since I was nine years old that I've seen it when we lived outside of St. Louis. Got it. And so Michigan and Missouri, Missouri to Simsbury, Connecticut, to Easton, Connecticut. And then I went to college in Boston, studied abroad in Würzburg, Germany, where I met my husband, who was an American studying abroad as well. He went down the secret service. He was not.

He was not. Then, oh, and then I moved to London because I had a German passport and it was part of the EU and I wanted to live abroad for a year. And we tried to move back to Germany. for him to get his master's, and it didn't work. And I was like, I'm staying. So I worked for Harrods and Bloomberg financial markets in London. And then moved.

For Harrods in London? How cool is that? It was pretty cool. Green parks just around the corner. Exactly. I know. That's great. So it was quite an experience.

Al-Faed was running it then. I don't know if you know. Absolutely. His son is who was killed in the car with Princess Dana, right? Exactly. Yeah. He was a pretty scary guy. Yeah.

So he kept your head down. He really was a scary guy, I'm told. It was a really scary guy. Yeah. Then moved to D.C. where my husband was finishing his master's. And then we got married in D.C. We wanted to go somewhere out, you know, new. We wanted to be in your mountains.

We thinking about Vermont. And the friend said, you should go check out Utah. So we went to Utah for our honeymoon to go skiing, fell in love with it. Park City, Deer Valley. We went to Salt Lake first. And it was, we were like, what is going on? It's so quiet here. And then we went up to Park City.

Beautiful up there. It was gorgeous. We rented a house, moved back to D.C., quit our jobs, and moved out six weeks later. It was like, we'd done a lot of travel in Europe and we were driving. I have pictures of me driving up the highway, up 80, Interstate 80, because it was so beautiful. And I had no idea this existed in America. Oh, it was so gorgeous. Beautiful.

And so then my husband got a job, he was working with Morgan Stanley, got a job offer in San Francisco. where we bought a house, lived a total of six months, hated it. And we got out right before the crash. So we got lucky. Moved to Greenwich, Connecticut. Then 9-11, we're like, everyone's like, oh, they're going back to Utah. And we finally did. And then, you know, we had a kid in Connecticut, a kid in Utah, and then we moved to London.

He got an opportunity with Morgan Stanley in London. We're there for three years, had another kid. And then moved to Zurich for two years. Then back to Surrey, England, outside of London. And then we moved to Wilton, Connecticut. Holy smokes. First of all, honestly, that's crazy. Yeah.

And now, a few messages from our generous sponsors. But first, I hope you'll consider signing up to join the Army at normalfolks. dot us. By signing up, you'll receive a weekly email with short episode summaries in case you happen to miss an episode, or if you prefer reading about our incredible guests. We'll be right back. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988, to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control.

Thirty-five years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse. He would say to himself,

Turn to the right to the victim's family and apologize. Turn to the left. Tell my family I love him. So he had this little practice. To the right, I'm sorry. To the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revision's History, the Alabama murders on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Ida. I'm Mytego, Mr. Juan. And on our podcast, Hungry for History, we mix two of our favorite things. food and history. Ancient Athenians used to scratch names onto oyster shells, and they called these Ostercon, to vote politicians into exile. So our word ostracize is related to the word oyster. No way.

Bring back the Ostercon. And because we've got a very Mikaasa esucasa kind of vibe on our show, friends always stop by. Pretty much every entry into this side of the planet was through the Gulf of of Mexico, no of America. No, the America. The Gulf of Mexico, continue to be so forever

and never, especially in the person. It blows me away how progressive Mexico was in this moment. They had land reform, they had labor rights, they had education rights. Mustard seeds were so valuable

to the ancient Egyptians that they used to place them in their tombs for the afterlife. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturno? Tales from the Shadows. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits

to bone-chilling brushes with super-neutral. natural creatures and experience the horrors to have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you. you get your podcast. Michael Lewis here.

My book The Big Short tells the story of the buildup and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely, but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become and eventually made billions of dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Isman. We fed the monster until it blew up. The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan,

there was no sign anything important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release, and a decade after it became an Academy Award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The Big Short Story, what it means when people start betting against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics.

Get the big short now at Pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads?

Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today.

I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My question is, it certainly has to be an adventure. But how do you ever feel like you have roots and real friendships and connectivity when you're never anywhere for any period of time? How does that work?

It's definitely hard, but I also keep in touch with people. It's kind of, it really, it sometimes feels like a full-time job. Keeping in touch with people. Well, I guess you've met people on nine continents. There's only seven. I mean, that an outpost on the moon. I'm sure you would have been there at some point. That is incredible that you've moved like that.

So from a childhood standpoint, though, what was the lack of connectivity for you? It was hard. I mean, there were good parts of it because you could, Every time you move, you can reinvent yourself, right? You can show up as a different person. Well, that's all so true. You're still the same person, but, you know, they don't know that whatever happened in kindergarten, you know. So there is a positive to it.

And I actually really, I rolled with it as a kid. And it just became sort of who I was that I never really thought, like, oh, how long are we going to stay here now? That didn't occur to me. But I threw myself in, really, every single time. It was hard when I moved in seventh grade to break into the clip. Like, that was a hard. Yeah. That was really hard.

That was trickier to try to make friends. And, you know, these people all knew each other since preschool. That's really what I credit with learning how to do the work to make friendships and throw yourself in. So that kind of sets who you are. You were a kid that's lived all over the place, grew up with actually a really interesting family dynamic, I think is fair to say. I mean, a German Secret Service and all of that, that's really kind of cool. And you've lived everywhere, and you've studied psychology because you care about the connectivity of the human being. And you show up in Utah, I think, is when you started having these ideas that we need to connect with people.

Is that right? Am I missing that? I don't know if it was Utah. I mean, I always, I enjoyed the block parties and neighborhood connections of my childhood. Like, those were really important to me. Go into some of those stories. Some of those stories. Yeah, they, so I remember moving in, when we moved to Michigan, my neighbor. How old were you?

I was in first grade. Okay. First grade, Michigan. Six, seven, six, seven. Oh, gosh. Something like that. I remember Mrs. Fisher coming from next door and delivering us a pie. I thought I would have thought for sure had been a casserole, but go ahead.

A casserole or a pie. It's what you do, right? Or what you used to do back at the day. Right, right, right, what we need to be doing. Right. Even if it's not homemade. And that really left an impression on me. That made me feel welcome as a kid.

And we had a great, I mean, we had sidewalk and so got to know all the neighborhood kids. Like that was the joy, right? Just being outside, mixed age play, up and down the sidewalk with my bike, you know, crashing. you know, things, things happened. It was a great pushing my little baby brother around in a stroller. And so, you know, that was the belonging first before, you know, I was in Mrs. Ness's class. And I'm still friends with a friend of mine from first and second grade. Crazy.

And then moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where we lived on a dead end street near a farm, and we had the best block party of my memory there. And it was just, it was full of joy. Like, it's sort of an all-American experience. You know, we're chasing fireflies, playing flashlight tag. The adults are having fun. Us kids are having fun. There is a trough. I have a picture of an old cattle trough for the water.

And us kids swimming in and my dad getting in with a full suit, you know, and just the joy. There's a picture of the joy on my face of that experience. So it was just so much fun. And those neighborhood connections were so important. I vividly remember the story. I had a third brother, or third child, the second brother, and he died three days later. He was born with half a heart and had pioneering surgery that didn't save him. And when my parents came home from the hospital, you know, pulling in the driveway with the wood-paneled station wagon and just their faces, right, red-eyed zombies.

And I ran to Mrs. Gilliam's house down the road. And she had four kids and she held me on her lap and rocked me. and told me about cherubs and that Justin was an angel in the sky. And to have, like, another person that you can, you know, another adult that a child can run to, literally run to for support locally is just, it's so meaningful and so important for parents, for families, for kids, for everyone. And that obviously had a big impact on my life. And boy, have we lost that today.

Yeah. I remember sitting here listening to you, hadn't even thought about this before now, but I remember always having two or three phone numbers of our closest neighbors, and I remember always as a kid feeling comfortable that if something bad happened, I could go to my neighbor. And my neighbor knew me and everything else. And the truth is, I only have the phone number of one neighbor right now. You got any phone numbers, your neighbors, Alex? Yeah, actually I do. I probably got four or so. Really?

But it's a topic we've talked about, I think, on a shop talk that you probably are familiar with this, the art of neighboring. Yeah. I don't want to interview that guy, but his whole thing of trying to know your seven closest neighbors and writing it down. So it's front of mind for me. But, yeah, I mean, a lot of people don't. A lot of people couldn't say that. Well, and I think we've also lost something that, you know, video games and handhelds have replaced kick the can and hide and go see. And when you play high and go seat and kick the can,

you're usually doing it in the eight or nine or ten houses up and along your street. And adults are sitting there looking at you out the window and there becomes familiarity and that kind of thing. And I think we've lost a lot of that connectivity for sure. 100%. I think there's a couple of reasons for it. I think cars definitely play a role in that. Cars.

Our streets are so busy. Yeah. Lack of sidewalks, but also fear, parental fear, of letting your kid outside on supervised. And also, I mean, well-founded because a lot of times people get in trouble for letting their kids outside unattended now. So, I mean, I've been working to reverse that problem.

But also, you know, what we think is a good neighbor now is someone that stays quiet, takes their trash in on time, and, you know, doesn't bother you. And carries a little plastic bag for their dogs. For their dogs, totally. Yeah. So. You know, Bill, if you really wanted to get to know your neighbors,

you know you would do? I would walk around undressed and leave you, grapes open? You need to get rid of your gate. You bulldoze your gate. Yeah, you could do that. I was going to say, throw the block party. But, you know, I'll be following up both of you. All right. So, those were experiences. There was a point, I think, I've read in Salt Lake, maybe I'm wrong, that led to Connecticut. Well, no, but you were having some block parties in Utah, right? We did. We had neighborhood block parties, too, there. But I was, you know, just a participant. That's what I'm saying.

As an adult. As an adult, yeah, absolutely. So then on your 467th move, you go to Wilton, Connecticut, which is where you are now. And this is what I read. That are your words, I think. So in our town of Wilton, Connecticut in 2016, there was a rise in insolity on Facebook. Man, that hit me when I read that. A rise and instability on Facebook.

a lot of vitriol. There was a legislator who talked about how she was receiving horrible emails from constituents on Facebook messages, but when she met them in real life, they were lovely people. She had an entirely different experience. The reason that hit, well, there's about nine reasons that information hit me. One was an army of normal folks. It's literally about connectivity and that how. I don't care how you vote who you love, what you espouse or what you look like.

If you're doing something extraordinary for someone in our community, I can celebrate you. Likewise, if I'm doing something extraordinary for somebody in my community, you can celebrate me. And all of a sudden, those barriers of political affiliation, race, religion, greed, become really less important because I see you as a human. Exactly. So we talk about that all the time on the show. You do. I also absolutely believe that one of our biggest problems in leadership and all over our country is that there's an enormous amount of power and wealth garnered by people who continue to increase both that power and wealth by crafting narratives that divide us. I think they work at Fox

I think they work at CNN I think they work up and down the halls of Congress and I think they are in government businesses connected to those peoples and halls of Congress I think they work in Silicon Valley certainly they work all over the country but you get what I'm pointing out

and I think it's hot time that we quit like sheep being led around by these folks as if they're shepherds because they're anything but a And I think it leads to a rise in civility, which continues to break down our country. And most recently, Alex gave me some information that wanted to make me throw up. But did you know that just this year they did a survey of Americans who said that in some cases, at least some cases,

38% respondents said that violence against another person, if I don't agree with what they say, is acceptable now. That is the definition of inscivility. And I think it's really easy to be all brash and incivil on a computer screen. Last thing I want to say is one of our guests said, it's really hard to hate somebody you sit down across from. So when you compound all of that stuff we've been talking about for the last six months, and I've never met you, and I read. So in our town of Wilton, Connecticut in 2016, there was a rise in instability on Facebook, a lot of vitriol. Basically, we could replace.

So in our country of the United States of America in 2016, there was a rise in instability on Facebook and a lot of vitriol. It just happened to be you lived in Wilton. There was a legislator who talked about how she was receiving horrible emails from constituents on Facebook messages. We could be saying there's legislation in public people that are being assassinated in the public square today. 100%. We could say that. But then she met them in real life, and they were lovely people, and she had an entirely different experience. Which is exactly what we're begging people to do.

Meet. Get out of your comfort zone. Get out of your vacuum and thought. And you might find that people can be lovely and have a difference in opinion of you. But civil, liberal, open discourse can break down so much of what is destroying our civility. Thousand percent. We'll be right back. Malcolm Gladwell here.

This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering,

we all too often make suffering worse. He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm I Belongoria, and I'm Maite Gomez-Guan.

And on our podcast, Hungry for History, we mix two of our favorite things, food and history. Ancient Athenians used to scratch names onto oyster shells, and they called these OsterCon, to vote politicians into exile. So our word ostracize is related to the word oyster. No way. Bring back the Ostercon. And because we've got a very My Casa is Your Casa kind of vibe on our show, friends always stop by. Pretty much every

entry into this side of the planet was through the Gulf of Mexico. No, the America. No, the Gulf of Mexico. Continuan forever and ever. It blows me away how progressive Mexico was in this

moment. They had land reform. They had labor rights. They had education rights. Mustard seeds were so valuable to the ancient Egyptians that they used to place them in their tombs for the afterlife. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo.

Won't you join me in Nocturno? Tales from the Shadows. An anthology of modern-day horror stories. inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures and experience the horrors to have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

You should probably keep your lights on for nocturnal, tales from the shadows. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Michael Lewis here. My book The Big Short tells the story of the build-up and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. It follows a few unlikely but lucky people who saw the real estate market for the black hole it would become and eventually made billions of. dollars from that perception. It was like feeding the monster, said Eisman. We fed the monster until it blew up.

The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan, there was no sign anything important had just happened. Now, 15 years after the Big Short's original release, and a decade after it became an Academy Award-winning movie, I've recorded an audiobook edition for the very first time. The Big Short's story, what it means when people start betting again, against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, it is as relevant today as it's ever been, offering invaluable insight into the current economy and also today's politics. Get the big short now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold.

Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads. Yes.

It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcasts we were doing.

Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And that was 2016. Now we're in 2025. Yeah.

So when I read you said that, I thought, well, my gosh, there has to be some huge governmental program to fix this. There has to be some huge top-down proclamation. We should start locking people up, or maybe we should start passing laws against things like this, or maybe we can have a bottom-up approach where just a normal person says, I know something that can help this. That's why I love your story. Thanks.

So why don't you take it from there? Yeah. So I saw this over and over again. And also with my work, I used to call people's homes, little silos of hell, because they're so isolated from others and what they're struggling with is stays in their home. What they need is their community, our village. And so that experience of I'm needing, you know, more face-to-face time coupled with, I was running a nonprofit and had established a free play task force. A free play? Mm-hmm. What's that? So it basically was helping educate parents and community

about the importance of, well, mixed age play. So basically neighborhood play, right? Kids are so structured, right? They go to school, they listen to, you know, the adults in charge. Then they go to Kumon for math, and they have to do what they're due. And then they go to ballet, and then they have to do what they're doing. Or football practice. Or football practice, right?

But it's the same thing. But it's the same thing. It's adult led. And there is, which is have about, right, they all fit in our lives. but it had overrun. Kids were having played deficit disorder, and they still do. This is not a real term, okay? That's a real term.

You just made it. And trying to find a way for kids to connect with each other was, again, block parties came in here. So I saw it coming back from Europe, specifically from Switzerland. Switzerland changed me in a big way, my parenting, in terms of what I learned kids were capable of. You don't realize how much your culture affects you and your parenting. What did you see in Switzerland?

And so, well, the number one thing was I learned how to stop saying be careful. So that there's- Because that's assumed or because it's unimportant? It is, you have confident and the kid's going to figure it out. And you don't need to, what I've learned now with my own kids, distract them by your worry. Right? And it's almost like- Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down just a second because that's, that's profound.

Don't distract your kids with your own worry. Let them figure it out. Don't quash their own creativity and problem solving. Yeah, and take them out of their zone, right? If they're climbing up something, you want them paying attention to what they're doing, not the, be careful that, you know, derails them from their concentration. And also feels like you're supposed to do that. Like, it was a compulsion. What's the cutoff?

How high do you let them climb up the tree? As high as they, you know, maybe you say, like, you give a, you know, so how are you, you're pretty high up there, right? How are you feeling about that is something I would suggest to American parents, right? What would a Swiss parent say? But you wouldn't say anything. Nothing. No.

And I still don't, I mean, you know, it's, you try to find a balance here, right? Like, just in helping. But that is so interesting to me. Really? Yeah, nothing. Knock yourself out. Well, I moved there, and all of a sudden, kids had, I literally, I saw a kid with a broken arm. Okay.

And I lived in Utah, so it wasn't great. It wasn't just buttoned up Connecticut. And I saw a kid with a broken arm, and I thought to myself, I didn't know kids still got those. Man. So it was just. When we grew up, everybody had a broken arm. It was a thing to sign the past. Broken arm, broken leg, you name it, right?

And it was such a different culture. Like, we weren't allowed to drive our kids. to school. They came home for lunch. My kids had like a mile walk to and fro. What do you mean you want a while to? The headmaster was like, this is not, we are not, that's not the culture we have here. We don't, you know, let your kids walk. And they walk from four and five years old. They have like a little safety tag. They're taught how to do it, but they, they walk to and from school in kindergarten. I mean, literally my kids would walk four miles a day. I love that. Yeah. So it was just a different, it was really an adaptation. Like,

The one vivid memory I have is of like a, I must have been a 16-month-old trying to climb on this steel railing around an ice skating rink. And it was snowy, right? And so they were trying to climb up it. And their mom is right there. And I literally have to bite my tongue, not to say anything. But they see their kid. They know what they're doing. He falls.

They just pop them back up. He goes, right? It's just, it was such a different culture. And then we moved back to the U.S. And there was a Facebook rant I did of how. I had to go in and sign my nine-year-old out after a club. And my Facebook rant was like, what are we doing? We're creating weak children.

Like, it was just a whole, you know, the fragile. Fraudelizing. Like, we're so paranoid about safety and fear and liability in this country, that it kills a lot of the, you know, things that our kids would be able to do because somebody's going to be mad if a kid got, anyway. I could rant on about that. I could talk about that forever. Helicopter parents, all of it.

I mean, you're right in my bailiwick. Our kids, we were fortunate that when our kids were coming up, we lived on three acres. I mean, not a farm, but enough land. And I love my wife for about a thousand reasons, but this is one of them. She would literally, at six and seven years old, tell them to go in the yard and find something to do. shut the door and not come in until 1130. And if they got thirsty, there's a hose. Awesome.

That's awesome. It is awesome. That's awesome. The boys got to pee in the yard. They can't come in the yard. The girl's peed in the yard. I mean, what's wrong with the girl peeing in the yard? I mean, it's no big deal.

I'm serious. We had chickens and, but the point is our kids are pretty creative because they had to problem them solve and they had to come up with ways to have fun and there weren't nothing that you could plug on the wall was outside with them yeah and i think that is really uncommon these days unfortunately unfortunately and you see it we already have the evidence kids are i have parents of kids who seven-year-olds wanted i right 11-year-olds that have attempted to suicide, right? That are, and we are, we're taking. Why? Why? Why? They are, they feel so unhappy. I think there's a lot of reasons. I think that are, are limiting their free,

their freedom, limiting, they're finding joy, right? They're so programmed that there's little room for joy. It really is almost institutionalizing amendment. Yeah, it really is. Wow. I wrote an article for LeCrow, Lenore Scanesi's organization. I know Alex knows. And the headline was, we're raising our kids in captivity and expecting them to survive in the wild. It just sums it up, right? You might find this of interest, Bill.

For your prep, I pulled some data on this whole topic. So 40 years ago, 66% of kids walked your bike to school. Today, only 10% do. in a 2018 survey found that American children spend 35% less time playing outside freely than their parents did. I think the number is higher than that. Taking your kid to structured soccer practice is not what I call playing outside. No, thank you. That's soccer practice.

Playing outside is going in the backyard, build a fort, build a tree house, dig a hole to China. Exactly. Get some bruises. If you get stitches, well, you get stitches. But culturally, then that's like, weren't you watching them, right? Like the parental blame piece in terms of them getting stitches or getting hurt or all of those things, right? Or we as parents feel like we've done, you know, could be external or it could be our own internal worry. Don't cripple your kids by your own worry.

What was it? I don't remember what I said. Captivity line. That sounds, yeah, basically that was it, yeah. I mean, that goes, that's a huge, I mean, that's cell phones in schools. And, you know, the pushback on bell to bell bands is because parents are terrified, right? It's their own parents. Like, obviously, school shootings are an issue.

That's true. And, right, just connectivity with your kid doesn't mean, you know, it's a parent's anxiety that wants there. We had a, in our town, when we first introduced it a year ago, parents went crazy. Introduce what? The bell-to-bell school ban on cell phones. So that meant they went in a lock pouch. Anyway, I'm going off topic. No, no, no.

It's happening here, too. We love it. It's, the biggest pushback was from parents in terms of not being able to get a hold of their kids. And that's all the front office folks. Parental anxiety, right? It's about our own fears that are getting in the way of giving our kids the opportunity to pay attention in class, not be worried about. bullied or filmed and actually have a conversation. Learn social skills in the lunchroom and in the halls.

And that concludes part one of our conversation with Vanessa Elias, and you don't want to miss part two that's now available listen to. Together, guys, we can change the country, but it starts with you. I'll see you in part two. Malcolm Gladwell here, this season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years, that's probably not long enough.

And I didn't kill him. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionous History, The Alabama Murders, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Ibel Angoria. And I'm Maite Gomes Rejoin, and this week on our podcast, Hungry for History, we talk oysters, plus the Miambe chief stops by. If you're not an oyster lover, don't even talk to me.

Ancient Athenians used to scratch names onto oyster shells to vote politicians into exile. So our word ostracize is related to the word oyster. No way. Bring back the OsterCon. Listen to Hungry for History on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Michael Lewis here. My bestselling book, The Big Short, tells the story of the buildup and burst of the U.S. housing market back in 2008. A decade ago, the Big Short was made into an Academy Award-winning movie.

Now I'm bringing it to you for the first time as an audiobook narrated by yours truly. The big short story, what it means to bet against the market, and who really pays for an unchecked financial system, is as relevant today as it's ever been. Get the big short now at Pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hey, it's Ed Helms host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. You're like, wait, stop, what? Yeah, it's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests.

Paul Shearer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan, Clepper. Listen to season four of Snafu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Talking about guns with others might not always feel comfortable, but it could save a life. Here's a way to start a conversation. Your family is going over to your neighbors home for dinner for the first. time. How would you ask if there are any unlocked guns in the home? Hey! Hey, we're so excited for tonight. Before we come over, though, may I ask if there are any unlocked guns in your home? Our guns are stored securely, locked in a safe that the kids can't access. Awesome. Learn how to have

the conversation at Agreetoagree.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council. This is an IHeart podcast.