The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens - Marty Kearns: "Building Networks in Uncertain Times"

Episode Date: October 19, 2022

On this episode, Nate is joined by Marty Kearns, a civic organizer and networking specialist. He and Marty discuss why both networks and communities will be critical to the coming challenges we face. How will the social ties we form now influence the outcome of power, peace and new social organization? How can we organize ourselves in order to best meet the future that is coming? About Marty Kearns:Marty Kearns is the Executive Director of Netcentric Campaigns, leading product design, project oversight, evaluation, development of advocacy network theory and strategic business planning. Prior to that Marty developed communication tools with Green Media Toolshed to help environmental activists. He has also created and organized numerous mass volunteer projects from data collection to wildlife preservation. For Show Notes and Transcript visit: https://www.thegreatsimplification.com/episode/41-marty-kearns

You're listening to The Great Simplification with Nate Higgins. That's me. On this show, we try to explore and simplify what's happening with energy, the economy, the environment, and our society. Together with scientists, experts, and leaders, this show is about understanding the bird's eye view of how everything fits together, where we go from here and what we can do about it as a society and as individuals. In the future, I imagine having only or at least primarily guests on this program who are working on responses and solutions to the coming great simplification. But for now, I'm still trying to comprehensively connect the dots, how our energy, money, ecological situation fits together and will change everything in the future. But today's episode is about responses, specifically the importance of networks. Today I welcome Marty Kearns, a civic organizer and networking specialist to the show.

Marty and I discuss why both networks and communities will be critical to the coming challenges we face. How will the social ties we form now influence the outcome of power, peace, and new social organization? How can we organize ourselves in order to best meet the future that is coming, which no individual can face? on their own. Please welcome the director of net-centric campaigns, Marty Kearns. Marty, good to see you. Good to see you, Nate. So let me get right into it, Marty. Kind of the end goal of the work that my organization and this podcast are doing ahead of the great simplification is to build networks of reality-aware pro-social humans to avert and even better steer humanity away from the default paths that my analysis kind of projects in coming decades,

because I think it's going to be necessary. But your work takes this end goal that I foresee as the actual starting point, that to build these networks is the primary goal, irrespective of what future arrives. Can you unpack for me and for our listeners your philosophy about this and your work? Tell us what you do and why. Yeah, so I'm the executive director of NetCenter campaigns, and for the last 22 years, have been working on organizing networks of people to create kind of social and policy change. We kind of step into these spaces where there's not a single government, not a single group, not a single business can solve the problem. And that within all of these really large, complex social problems, there's always network builders.

You know, most movements can think immediately who are the network builders that you work with. The problem or the challenge and the opportunity where we focus is that those network builders need skills, just like any other work. They need a framework. They need knowledge and they need a set of tools that help them accelerate their work and do it well. So NetCenter campaigns, our organization looks at these important social movements and tries to support the network builders in order to kind of transform the strategy that. they're working on. Real quick, so that I can understand, what's the difference between a network builder and a community organizer? Or what's the difference between a network and a community start there?

Yeah, that's good. I mean, so there are different lenses that looking at people. So, like, when you think about community, you know, it's kind of like these, this group of individuals with some kind of common interest, common, they are common from a particular area, a group of people with a common characteristic, you know, a common profession. You can think of like academic community or, you know, scientific community. Those are kind of, there's a commonality and the commonness is the bond. A network is slightly different. A network is, in a general sense, it's defined as a set of nodes kind of connected by ties between them and among them. All the elements are not common. You know, in our context, you can have networks of people with ties along seven elements.

and some of them are, you know, communication grid, trust, common language, shared vision, shared resources, feedback mechanisms. We have a way that we tease apart one of those seven elements. And any of those can actually be strengthening, you know, you can have a network that's just built by trust or that's just built by a communication grid. And that's what we think about. So the difference for me between a community and a network is the way that they're connected. And there are networks within community.

and there are communities within networks. So there are somewhat overlapping definitions in different ways. By your definition, it seems like a network is potentially, at least at the onset, more flexible and able to overcome the polarization in our tribal conversations than maybe a geographically centered or a topically centered community. I don't know if that's why I differing. I think that there's a lot that kind of network organizing teaches us about building power and building capacity. And it's really about kind of bringing that

knowledge set, that skill set to those network organizers within movements. It's not a, for me, it's not in either or. People can be in multiple communities at the same time. You can be a community of podcasters, a community of science ecologists, you know, and your local community. And you can be in multiple networks at the same time. So they're just different lens. Like I feel like a community organizer or an organizational builder might be someone who works with the bone structure. And, you know, the network organizers kind of work with the nervous tissue. You know, it's still the same body. It's just kind of different lenses and different kind of interventions that we'd come up with.

The first thing that comes to mind to me is we're part of a global energy dissipating network of an economic system pursuing economic growth. Yet at the same time, we deeply lack community. Well, you may lack a lot of, so you could lack community or you can say, okay, how many people in that community that that you're talking about can actually talk with each other? So what's the state of the communication grid among people within that community? But it's vast with the internet, right? It's potentially vast. Potentially vast, but potentially and actually are two different things. And where's the rubber hit the road there?

The difference between potentially and actually with the internet on your work. For us, you know, networks are very concrete. So we can think of a boundary. who's in this network and who's not. And then we can think, what is the state of the ties between the people within that network? Can they communicate with each other one to one? Can they communicate with each other one to many? Can they communicate with each other many to many? Can they have those conversations? Do they have the common language when they say something like collapse? Do they all mean the exact same thing or do they mean something different? Do they trust each other to what level do they

trust each other? So each of those elements actually give us opportunities to kind of intervene and manage the growth of the strength of that network so that it can do more. You said you've been doing this for 22 years. How did you get interested in the concept of networks? And what was your aha moment on how important it is? Yeah. Well, my whole life I'd been kind of a campaign person, a political organizer, an issue organizer.

I'd started the Georgia River Network in Atlanta, protecting the rivers in Georgia before that. I had worked in politics. And the kind of trigger event for me was 9-11. You know, my wife was nine months pregnant with our first kid. And we were here in D.C. And 9-11 happened. And I started to read everything I could on networks, you know, some early stuff by Rand,

the book Networks and Net Wars, you know, stuff by Valde's Krebs. Just really trying to look at what are we facing here? And what I realized was that the people would have been thinking a lot about networks, We'd been thinking about how to pull them apart. And that that was actually, I think six months later, I calmed down. My kids started sleeping through the night, so I didn't have to read so much. And I was like, wow, my whole movement, I live in networks. And the things that they're pulling out is the start of a reverse engineering document

for what we need to build in order to create network power for good. And then I think I wrote my first paper then and this guy from the Margarety Casey Foundation found it. And I was like, you're on to something. Tom David. And he's like, you're on to something, but you don't have it figured out at all. Go, push further. And I've been pushing further for 20-some years. And, you know, that's what kind of got me started.

So what, at its core, what's the special sauce and why do you think it's so important that people listening to this in the United States or Europe or wherever start to understand and act building networks in their life? Yeah, tons. When I run across your work, you know, and I think about the superorganism, you know, the thing I think is it doesn't have a functional nervous system yet. You know, it seems to have a diet and an exercise and an ability to consume. But, you know, I think one of your early interviews, Creel talked about like the human race had this nervous breakdown, you know, and I kind of worry about that because I was like, I think we're just getting our nervous system sorted out. we do work in Ghana in rural Ghana and one of the things that hit me was on our field work you can see people literally like on disconnecting the solar power that was set up to their water pumps in order to charge their cell phones and I think somewhere your literature you're you talk about the leap to becoming a superorganism and in part that might have been our diet

But I think somewhere in there is also we're still evolving as a species. And I think the evolution is this network connection. Like it's right there at the foundational base with Maslow's hierarchy is like staying connected. When you see refugees in Syria or come out of war zones, among the first things they do, they grab food that water and they want to hook up to start talking to family. Like there is this network connection that we crave that is going to be. there forever. It's going to make it through the collapse because it is part of our DNA. Well, we're incredibly social species. And when you're just sitting there in a day and you feel

fine and you don't have dysentery or diarrhea, your impulse is to connect with your network, your friends, your community. And then if you do get sick, you're probably going to re-plug in those solar panels to the water purifier. But tell me more about your experience in Ghana. Yeah, we organized a conference back in 2004 about the use of the use of cell phones and civic engagement. 2004, that was like crazy talk. And one of the guys that came was from the DRC, you know, and he had been working on using cell phones in the Congo to fight Lombada, the war criminal, you know, about the abduction of children and the local militias. And it struck us as like, wait, how is this working? Like it was an incredible story.

and you start to realize like there's this connectivity that people want and they prioritize it high, high up. World Bank did a study that there was a collapse in cigarette sales when cell phones hit new markets. Different mode of dopamine delivery. Yeah, well, or just the value of that connection. You know, like it is really, really high. And I don't think we've figured out what to do with it. I mean, I know a lot of your guests kind of look at the division around COVID as a failure. You know, for me, that's like the entire world put the brakes on for a month, month and a half.

Nobody predicted that was possible. Like, yes, it fell apart and it fell apart in some bad ways. But I think in the longer arc of history, we're going to look at COVID and be like, wow, that was pretty impressive. In 2014, if you had talked to any scientists, any epidemiology, fireologist and said, okay, we're going to be. going to have an Ebola outbreak, it's going to go across three countries and there's going to be 24,000 people with it. It's going to have an R of 1.3. What's going to happen? They're going to be like, it's going to spread. It's going to kill everybody. It's all over, game over. Cultures, all that. It didn't happen. There was no boss in charge of that. Like, that network capacity is just

starting to get tested, is starting to develop. So I do feel like that's, that's an important thing for us to think about when we think about what's happening and how we're going to steer towards some kind of path that is more just. Okay. So let me ask you this. I don't know if you've listened to the podcast I've done with Tristan Harris and Azza Raskin and Daniel Schmachtenberger on algorithms and polarization and the YouTube and other things upregulating certain viral things that are actually not good

for building community. They're good for building animosity and outrage and things like that. how do you build the pro-social networks that you're working on in the face of this larger technology superorganism that's upregulating the wrong things, as it were? Yeah. So we're really intentional, and I think that's the thing that discipline and intentional around the process of network building and the skills of network building. Like there's real ways you can test.

Is this network getting stronger or weaker? Does it? Are the quality of those seven elements social ties, trust, common language, common vision, shared resources, actors, and feedback mechanisms, are they getting, improving in quality, and spreading in access, does everybody getting access to those? So that's the way that we build networks. I don't entirely buy all the narratives on how much more divided we've become.

I mean, you know, in a longer time span, you know, we started off as a genocidal conquering male-dominated mess in the North America. I mean, there's no place worse to have started than the early, you know, the early Americas. And, you know, the rights and the work that we're doing, like, I really, I feel like when you watch that stuff, it's the, we're in the last gaps of fire where that behavior is being snuffed out in so many ways. And it flares up. But I do not feel like it's on a market.

march towards power. I don't think that's in human nature. I think when technology fights with human nature, human nature wins. And, you know, there might be this little blip in time where that kind of those algorithms are dangerous. But, you know, look at the next generation. Are they falling forward as quickly as the older generation? I don't think so. Oh, I'm not so sure about that. I think they're more prey to the potential addictions and constantly watching TikTok instead of going and meeting their neighbor and things like that than the older generation. True, true. But I think the power of those connections are just as real and just as valuable to their human experience as going to see your neighbor. But you're not really competing with the YouTube algorithm

with your work with net-centric campaigns. It's actually using your own software or Facebook to face or things like that. So you can build a network without the up or down regulation of the algorithms. Yes. Yes. Yeah. You know, when you think about organizational capacity, organization like good board, good branding, you know, smart intellectual capital. You've got all these things that you're building on. If you had somebody who's from a big company come in and talk about that, you could very say, how do we build our organization? Nobody's giving you free organizational capacity. If you talk about building a network and you talk about communication grids, common language, common narratives, there's a lot of tools and services that are coming online for free

as part of our culture becomes more networked. And that's what kind of the underdogs, the resistance are exploiting as they're exploiting that network capacity to increase their power. I don't know a lot about this, Marty. So forgive some naive questions. Does Dunbar's number in our ability to only carry a certain number of real relationships in our brain, given its 1,300 cc's, give or take 150 relationships. Does that limit the number of networks? Is there a cap? And therefore, we have to be selective about which networks we're involved in. Oh, we're definitely selective about which networks we're involved in, because nobody wants to be in another network. Nobody. But they'll all join one that promises more value than the one that they've got. The lack of barriers of entry and the

lack of barriers of exit make networks very, very powerful. I don't know, you know, I don't know about that. I've talked a little bit with people about that. Is, are we limited in the number of networks? Or can we continue to harness information from broader and broader sectors from people that we don't trust? I think that's an interesting question. That's not really what I do. So I don't know the answer to that, I guess. Is a Google group a network? No, we have a quiz. So just, you know, if the nodes in the network are not connected to each other, if they don't share any of those seven elements, then they're not a network. So just being on an email list is not a part of a network. Unless I organize the email list with 37 systems ecologists friends over the last decade. So it is kind of a common language.

Common language, climate change, energy, trust. Some trust, some vision. Some vision. Yeah, yeah. That's, that's there. So yes, I would say just based on a cursory, yeah, that's a network. Do everybody else in there recognize that they're part of that network? That's another part of it. So that would be, that would be a network. And it's difficult, anxiety producing at times nasty and messy. Is that one of your criteria as well? No, no, no. That's there's, I mean, you have to, just like, just like community. There's healthy and unhealthy. There's functional and dysfunctional. There's networks and communities that. There's networks and communities that, are used by hate groups and terror cells, and there's ones used by A.A. to deliver recovery to millions of people. Like, it's a structure. Okay. So would you mind giving me an example from start to present or historically of an issue or a network that you or your organization were involved in starting from scratch, and it was a success? And what did that look like and how did it come about? So we worked with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for four years to start a network, to build their network around fighting the epidemic of childhood obesity.

They had been doing a lot of grants. They had a community of people that had similar backgrounds and perspectives, but they often totally disagreed on what is the solution of childhood obesity. Some would say it's marketing. Some would say it was the size of the food. Some would say it was obesity. some would say it's, you know, the kids aren't moving enough, so NFL play 60 would be in there. And others would say it's the side, you know, it's the marketing to the kids. So they would fight the NFL.

You know, you can't have catering. So when you have a strategy like that where it's a complex wicked problem that solving one part of it actually creates more problems and the other part, there is no kind of top down singular approach. So we went in, we talked with them about that assessment. And we said, look, you know, you need an all of them strategy. And that's network building. So we worked with them to provide, to organize, to interview people to talk about how does leadership shift? Who are we pushing power to in this network?

How does that power move? And then we designed the work with them. That network grew to about 3,000 individuals from people working for hospitals to people working for food desert groups in Philly to the American Heart Association. And in the end, it was working on, you know, 350. thousand supporters. We worked with Let's Move in the White House. We worked with all kinds of collaborators and pushed for policy change at the city levels around food deserts and tram transportation, at the state level, around school meals, funding for different programs, advancing science, providing public comment when their agencies worked on things. And then leaders within that

movement. So within each of these, it's not us designing. It's the network pulling people in, creating a space where they collaborate and then once they decide to collaborate, making sure that the network is more successful. You build a network because you want people in the network to do things and you want them to be more successful in their efforts because the network exists. It's not the same as directing it

in a traditional kind of campaign, you know, top-down model. So that network is still going on. I think American Heart Association works it. We've done it again in our work with climate and anti-fracking activists. We organized six years ago, starting in 2016. There's a lot of tension in the fracking space with leaders from across the country and across

different states fighting. Do we regulate it? Do we focus on pipelines? Do we focus on disposal wells or landfills? Do we do a ban like they did in New York? And what do we do if they want a ban and we're in Pennsylvania and they're flaring stuff in our backyard? So Halt the Harm is now about 4,000 grassroots leaders, 20,000 activists.

and they are pushing for all kinds of change and reform around the country. And that's both of those networks we've set up from scratch and accelerated through that growth process. And what does that mean exactly? You were able to see the common interest of this group of people. And then you provided scaffolding or technology or how did the network come into existence? What was this special sauce? Yeah, we always start with listening.

So try and figure out what's there. What are the networks that are there? And one of the questions that we ask is, so we succeed. Ten years down the road, you've done it. You've stopped the harms from fracking. Ten years down the road, you stopped. You've reversed the epidemic of childhood obesity and everybody's getting healthier. Ten years down the road, something different has occurred. You're the governor. You're the president of the United States. You can throw a party. Tell us who you invite. And that's where you start to get a sense of what's the boundaries of this network. So they start saying, oh, well, you know, we'd want the people fighting pipelines and the landfill and all the, you know, like all those people would be there at this party because all of us would have to have succeeded in order for us to have actually done what we want to do. And then we go and we look at that, all the names and the types of jobs that they've presented and say, what's the state of that network today? Do those people, can they talk to each other? Can they get a message out to each other? When we did the early work with Robert Wood Johnson, we went back and said, look,

the only way you can get a message out to this vast network of experts and other people is to get an article in the New York Times. Is that really where? Because that was the only source that like 40% of the network listened to. You know, in Halt the Harm, I think was NPR was the higher, one of the higher rates. So you can't get a message out. So there's no way this network can actually swarm or do things or collaborate or they were not all following the same Twitter. They're not all following the same whatever. There's no channel that they pay attention to. So that's, That was our first, you know, option was how do we get a channel organized that's actually going to appeal to them and serve them in some way. And that's what we do again and again is we try and look for where the communication group. Where do they build trust? What tools do they use? Who do they hire? What's their next hire?

Where are they blindsided by things? Where are the turf wars? You know, and we try and discover that's things that are valuable and things that are governed poorly. And that's why you get turf war. So, like, that's a great opportunity for doing something around and organizing the network of the people who fight the turf wars. So it sounds like it's kind of a cross between civics and diplomacy and divorce counseling

and PR slash marketing that you're figuring out the channels and the pathways after you assess, after you listen and assess the challenge. Yeah, I think once we understand the boundary of who needs to be involved, it's really about trying to serve them, trying to figure out what is the thing that we have to put it. what's the honeypot we have to put on the table to attract them to participate in the network? To go through that hassle and be like, I don't want to join an hour org, but that honeypot, that's good enough. I'm going to show up for that. And then once they're there, then you have the other strategy of now they're there.

How do you connect them to each other? What are the kinds of things that you can do that gets them to trust each other, that makes them understand where each other might be reliable, where each other might be likable. And that's how trust evolves. They're likable and reliable. It's the combination of those. We all have people there. So we're lacking in trust in our nation. I mean, according to my purview of what's going on.

So you're saying that rather than building trust and then creating a network, you're saying that building a network and that itself then creates trust over time. No, I think we have to be intentional about it. There's a lot of business models, as you've seen, that make money by ripping people apart, by putting people in smaller communities and smaller tribes. and making money off of them. Where are the big national programs to counterbalance that? National service.

You know, you can look at different places. And we should be doing that at the city, state, and national level. There should always be a how are we building consensus? How are we building consent to move forward? We can't move forward until we have consent. What does that mean? It means everything goes slower. It just means it.

You know, there's not a single fracking project that had they listened to the frontline communities, they would have moved forward with because people would not accept, they would not give consent to be polluted or to expose their kids to cancer or to risk their water or their air. You might have gotten 50% of them. You might have gotten 80% of them, but 20% of them would know it's a bad idea. Our model right now just ignores that. It ignores the impact on them. It ignores them because they're poor. It ignores them because they're different from whoever's making the decision. And I think that kind of approach, very practical, very like, how do we bring people together, you know, build back better, the new bills, the COVID. Where were the opportunities for everybody to be involved?

Where was government kind of leading the way and say, look, we've got to repatch this broken fabric that we've got. I'm not seeing those kind of initiatives on any kind of scale that we need in order to combat this kind of other models that are pulling this apart. Well, here's kind of a dark question. Don't before people get involved in networks in a pro-social way like you're discussing, don't they have to first want to be involved? Because I see bright spots of people really caring about these issues. But I also see a lot of apathy. I don't care.

Things are too far gone. I'm just going to focus on my own little thing. You've got every network that we say, we don't say join the network because it's a network. Never. We have this service that we think. think people like you who were trying to support would find useful. It's a value proposition to the user for immediate satisfaction. You know, that's, that's, you start with that. You always start with a lot of services. In the beginning, it was, Facebook was the only thing they enabled you to, like,

share photos or find your high school friend. Like, they were rolling out new services all the time because they were trying to attract people. Now, once all the people are there, they don't have to, when was the last time they announced anything? You know, like, like, you don't have, you, they come for people. So in the beginning of our networks, we offer blogging tools, insights, campaign services, you know, all kinds of things that people who are doing the work need and want. And they'll join the network to get access to that. They don't want to be in another network. And then we very subtly introduce them to other people like them, introduce them to other people that are reliable, introducing the stories of other people. And that's, give them opportunities to

connect, make the right thing, the easy thing to do. I guess that's where it's different from like a knowledge community or knowledge building. Like, it's really got to be what is that person that you need talking points? You need advertising help. You need outreach assistance. You need access to polling and opinion research. Here's my angle on this.

Correct me if I'm wrong. I think massive energy surplus and complexity has allowed us to function without community relative to our ancestors and cultures of the past. so that our networks today are trying to get either novelty and distraction or information in order to make profit or an investment or a cryptocurrency or something like that. But the networks aren't really about social and human capital the way that they once were, the way that they are in tougher times or in the global south. And so my deep suspicion and prediction is that before too long and probably sooner rather than later, our country, the United States and many other countries are going to need this social and human capital again. And it's going to be one of the most important assets that we have. And so how do we start to build networks in communities that are still full of people that are still full of people that.

expect a George Jetson future of flying cars and super abundance. And we're not going to need people so much because we can just stay in our house with our own loved ones and order stuff from Amazon, et cetera. So what do you think about all that? Yeah. I mean, I think one of your guests cited some research about a study that they did where he broke down his car. He brought a car that was broken down and like he saw who stopped to help him.

And there were like other people with kind of crappy cars and that all the rich cars. when flying by. You know, I think, I think we're all going to be in crappy cars, so to speak, in this. And you see that. You know, that the thing that the government really doesn't, didn't do with Hurricane Katrina and the Cajun Navy did was, you know, activation of volunteers that work as an extension of, of the relief effort. In 9-11, for everything that went out, you know, it was people coming in and volunteering to do

with the dig and look for survivors. Like, we as a species really do well. I think, you know, some of the work around coronavirus and, you know, all this stuff that people came together to help each other out through that, that's going to scale as well. And that's going to scale in proportion to the threat to us. And then, you know, I'm sure it's going on right now in Pakistan. I'm sure that the government has collapsed. Companies have collapsed, but the networks of people are the ones who are saving each other. So I do think that we are going to continue to invest in the social capital and the network capital necessary to deal with more complex and larger and larger problems.

There is a, you know, this energy collapse is coming at us. And I think networks will take shape in much larger form. The question is, how can we get those networks a little bit of life breathed into them ahead of time so that there's more scaling and not just a. sudden organization at the last moment. Yeah, I think we can be intentional about it. We can start working it into, like I said, working it into all of our government programs, working it into the programs that companies, companies use. There's, you know, network building is a skill. It is a repeatable, as we've shown, process. You focus on the right things and you create

network capacity. That's it. And you focus on promoting the use of that network and you create network size. Like, we've been able to repeat that again and again. In, you know, when you look at organic networks, markets, you know, farmers markets, those kind of things, there are tons of networks that people invest in and create and those thrive. So you've mentioned Pakistan and Ghana. Do networks work differently there than in the global north? And why? What has been your experience and observation. They use different things. The work we're doing internationally got started when I was doing a presentation on

our work on fracking or child load health. I forget which one of the program officers came to us and said, you know, I've built water systems all over the world. We've built water systems. And one of the fundamental differences between the projects that succeed and the projects that don't succeed is the engagement of the local network of leaders around the project. And he's like, I've never seen this methodology. He's like, would you do it?

I was like, I've never worked internationally when I was young. But I haven't really brought this model. So a big part of it was going to test it in Ghana and say, hey, look, I make no promises, but I'm really interested in kind of bringing my A game to this challenge around developing capacity to advance water sanitation and hygiene in these new settlements and settlements, 65,000 people, 140 water wells. really low sanitation, you know, practices. And, and what we found was it was there. There was a need for a network and that the methodology that we've been doing has been growing. So right now, I think we're two years in and on that project, we have the local government is who we're working with there. They are building a network to manage customer service around brand new water sanitation

and hygiene initiatives. And it's the same seven elements. It's totally different. Instead of internet, we're using radio and community information centers, which are, are these broadcast megaphones on a tower. Instead of campaign contest, we're doing things around, you know, sanitation contest. You know, it's different. The methodology is solid. But don't, in a situation like that with 65,000 people and 100-some wells, you mentioned, doesn't a network happen organically?

Doesn't emerge naturally with all those humans? or does it need some scaffolding and direction? I mean, I think people try all the time. You know, networks just like organizations or other government programs fail at an astonishingly high rate. You know, like in a roll of the dice. I'm sure the market women are building networks. The traditional chiefs are building networks. The government health service is going around and talking to people and connecting to each other.

I think if you want that to scale, you want it to be something that you can rely on And you want it to be something that focuses attention and builds specific capacities to advance wash. You've got to be a little bit more intentional about it. And that's what we're providing the training and support for. I wonder if the emergent networks that naturally happen scale around power, both social power and energetic energy per unit time power. And what you're talking about is a more democratic way of creating a network with your seven metrics.

I'm just speculating. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I increasingly think that ours is just, it's just a way to artificially tease things out. It's an MRI, you know, we come into a network that's weak or that somebody really wants to expand because they're putting more projects in because it's critical. And we're able to look at it in a unique way and find those specific capacities and increase them.

So I think it's more a tool of analysis. You know, I think you build a network to shift who's got power and the shift who's got access to leadership. If we, we have done work in the past and stopped because nobody was, the people who wanted to build the network, were not really interested in having new voices and new people lead new initiatives within the network. What they wanted was a following. They wanted a broadcast. They wanted, they wanted the power of the network without actually thinking about, you know, I'm building a network so other people succeed. So this is a tangential question, Marty, but based on your experience in Ghana and internationally, you know, there is a large

material throughput disparity between the global north and the global south. We could accurately say the global south is materially disadvantaged relative to the global north. But are they socially disadvantaged? I could argue that the global south has already been living the great simplification in many ways. First of all, why is it so hard to share life learning across the global North-South divide? And what can we materially rich people listening to this podcast learn about the social capital

that is already very healthy in some of these materially poorer locations? First, I'd say, ask them. ask, listen. I've been fortunate enough to travel to Ecuador and Zambia and Zimbabwe. And the people there, yes, they have to deal with HIV AIDS and lots of uncertainties, but they're happy, healthy, and socially connected. And every time I go to a place like that and I come back to fly to Miami or whatever, I notice this huge social disconnect.

So I'm just wondering if you have any learnings. or speculation on that dichotomy? I think people refine and build what they can. You know, like we're builders as part of our DNA, just like we're growers. You know, I think you ask that at one point. And the thing that's there, there's tons of wisdom and answers there. There have been people working on the very problem that most of the people who listen to this podcast are really worried about in some theoretical sense. Be like that the wisdom is out there.

I think there's a saying the futures here is just unevenly distributed. That's right. We owe each other help. We can learn from those that are kind of suffering from our bad choices and listen to what they want and what they asked for. And I think that's really hard because they want different things. If they're given leadership, they're going to ask for different things, then we're willing to give up. And we need to come to terms with that. I don't think there's any differences in making the transition.

for them versus us, I think emotionally maybe for people who have had it and then lost it. But in reality on the ground, there's no difference in the end state. You could go to Appalachia. You go to where I grew up in Scranton. You know, like, there's been places here that have collapsed and lost 50% of their revenues and 70% of their energy and all that kind of stuff. Like, it's happened in lots of places, you know. I mean, Scranton used to be like Silicon Valley. You know, it was they were taking money on the ground.

So I guess that's it is just like just this idea that we're evolving to adapt like many species to lower energy, less food and harder habitats. And evolution happens in generational transition. So there's, I think the idea that we're going to evolve without that kind of giving up foods and behaviors and other types. Like it's not regression of evolution. It's not devolution. That doesn't happen. It is the process of adaption and evolution. and cultural evolution cultural even species you know like this whole idea of being networked or being less dependent on energy is going to be something our species you know we've gotten taller we're going to get shorter like I think

there's a whole bunch of stars going to happen yeah over time we're going to get shorter yeah yeah I mean I you know so but I guess what I'm teasing out here is that the importance of networks and the examples that you've given Scranton and Ghana and other places is we're such a social species that we take for granted. All this material stuff is correlated to our future well-being when in reality just the

networks and building community and daily interaction with other humans, we've kind of lost that in this late capitalistic society. And that is a silver lining that we're going to need that again. and it's going to be messy, but it's going to be possibly great because we're going to self-organize in the ways that we need to. Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think the other thing is you sit on this side of the opportunities that you have to connect with, especially you or some of the people that you like the ultra wealthy, the people who think that they're insulated from this stuff. They're not in a better position. You know, they're not like they've acquired shit, but they there's not a, it's not a better position.

and they're not, they haven't avoided the kind of full ride on this ticket. I mean, it's a dead, it's a dead, you know, if we were all at the top and like, oh, you know, Jeff Beaz and Elon Munster, the happiest, most fulfilled, happiest luxury life ever, those guys seem miserable. They seem miserable. Their lives, they're like train wrecks. Well, I have personal experience with that. I used to manage money for high net worth individuals on Wall Street, and most of them, not all of them,

but most of them were more miserable than the club. who were making 25 grand a year processing the trades. And that realization in my job was one of the reasons I left. Because I was like, I thought the goal was to be rich and then you would be happy. It's just you have more digits and more worries and a lot of time more compulsion to grow the amount of digits. So we're built for simple things like empathy and community. But our current economic system is pulling us away from simple.

things. So in your experience, either just in your network building or in your own life, how do we as individuals resist this poll and plant seeds of community while this cultural media Madison Avenue siren song of consumption and stimulation is still loudly singing? What are some first steps? Love the victims. Love the victims? Yeah, root for the little guy. You know, shift who you follow as leaders. and you'll shift away from those leader mindsets. You know, you can't admire what anybody who's making money and fracking is doing if you know victims of fracking and oil and gas. You've been, you know, be a cheerleader for the people who are trying to do impossible things.

You know, be supportive. Give them your comments. Thank them for their work. You know, who you celebrate. It's literally like a small shift in a mental attitude. And all of a sudden, all the marketing and all that other stuff, really starts to dissipate. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

you know, if you, you know, if you look at the real, the real thing and you root for the, make sure that the groups at the edge are being listened to and celebrated that, that, that, that was enough for me to kind of shift my orientation in a way that I'm, I can, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm happy with, you know, I like rooting for the little guy. So that also dovetails with intrinsic motivation as opposed to external validation. That if you are intrinsically motivated to root for the little guy on issues that you care about, that gives you this kind of shield to repel the glitz and glamour that's on our advertisement and commercials and airwaves. If you fall in love with the activist, you fall in love with the people who are standing in front,

who are so pissed off and frustrated that they're getting arrested, you know, it's really, and you follow their stories, it's almost impossible to buy into the nonsense and that accumulation of capital matters because you see the victims, you know, you see the people who are getting ignored because somebody wants to make a dollar, you know, somebody, so, yeah. So go down that path. Tell us a story or two from your experience. that what's happened along the way that's delighted you or inspired you about the human spirit and fed your your natural optimism because despite what's going on in the world, every time I talk to you, you're just fired up and have a smile and a laugh,

despite the seriousness of our situation. Can you give me a couple examples of what's fed you in your experience? I mean, it's funny because I thought about this and I was thinking about, you know, am I optimistic? I was like, no, I'm not optimistic. You know, I think that's a different thing. Things are going to turn out all right. I don't think that that's the case. You're committed with a smile on your face. I'm cheerful. You know what I mean? Like, I used to go camping a lot with a troop. And there was always like rain and nasty weather and there be somebody who would just have a grin on their face. And every movie that you look at,

There's people in ridiculous circumstances that still remain cheerful. Transition happens. People pass. There's some people that face death cheerfully and there's some that are horrified by it. I think they both know they have cancer. They both know what's going on. So I think we slip from that. That's normal.

I don't think it's consistent all the time. We get angry or rage or depression. But I think the answer is to kind of commit to being cheerful. And when I think of the good things and the things that give me hope, I do think of the progress that we've made as a species over a long period of time. Is it done? No. We'll be done in my lifetime.

Maybe not. But a lot of the great works were not done in one lifetime. People worked on them and toiled away and handed it off to the second or third generation. And when you think about that, you know, that kind of makes me, makes me okay. You know, for all of the worst of this, we're 500,000 votes away in Wyoming, you know, a statehood in D.C. Or a million people moving from New York and California to two states would drastically change the trajectory of the largest economy in the world. You know, like that's an organizing problem. That's not an insolvable problem.

You know, if people can go serve in the military for five years to, you know, go be a part of that complex and solving that problem to protect America, why not everybody do six years in Laramie, Wyoming? I mean, literally half a million votes drops two Senate seats and makes them competitive and all kinds of interesting things. Like, I don't think these are unsolvable problems. The scientist doesn't tell us that they're unsolvable problems. There's big change that's needed, and I don't think that that's out of reach. I think the answers are more community-based than political, because whether Democrats win or Republicans win, we're still part of an energy-dissippating hungry superorganism that is now past peak. And I worry about which governance models in coming decades will work. And I think we need civic resolve and better community and better networks that are aware of these things.

But a big difference between your work and mine is I'm trying to build awareness and it's factual and science-based and integrated, but it still is conceptual, right? And you're doing practical things on the ground. You know, I think, I mean, I'm sure you feel this in your work, but like how do you move away from worry as you take action? You know, like worry is just when I sit with the science, when I sit with the kind of comprehensive science from across fields that you do, you get worried, you know, and you got them. Like the only way to get out of that is action. Like I just, there's no mental way out of that. I think we're consistently being traumatized. I think the youth are being traumatized by all this stuff. I totally agree. I mean, my, my coping is I go for a bike ride or I hang out with my dogs or chickens or go in the forest.

But when you say action, what do you mean by that? I think it's those, you know, personal action at the local level. Being a cheerleader, providing support, looking for who's the victim and how are you helping them out? You know, who's the new voice? there's no seed money and non, you know, like you can be an angel investor and not have cash. You know, who are the people that are working on impossible things and how do you, how do you support them? How do you support them in giving them connections, giving them access to things? I think those are what you can do to shift who's in charge or who's a leader is really important.

So maybe we start a network that would be scalable at different levels in the United States called impossible things. that need to happen. No, but seriously, though, so this is a complex question. Perhaps you can offer your expertise. I'm a teacher and an analyst, not a community organizer. I know very little about that. So given my organization's work, what advice would you have about the development of seeing what's happening, what's likely to happen?

We're going to have to deal with a lower energy and material throughput future in the not-too-distant number of years. How would you think about developing a network of like-minded people in Topeka, Kansas, in Rockville, Maryland, in Red Wing, Minnesota, in Fairbanks, Alaska, that would be a network that would be self-sustaining and self-governing? Let's start there. Would you have suggestions? Well, I mean, I don't know enough about all the nuances of your work, but, you know, when I think about models that work in that way, they're all focused on helping yourself by helping the new person. You know, when you think about churches, the 12-step programs, shack dwellers international, mutual aid programs, microfinance programs that kind of you help yourself by getting together to help

somebody else, the newest person. And that those are the kinds of loose distributed networks that grow and spread because it's baked into the core operating piece. So I think really trying to think through who's it going to attract. You know, when you look at transition networks or you look of those others, it's like how do we find the model of ritual, the model of behavior where we're building it in that the first thing you've got to do is help somebody else. And that in helping them, you're improving your skill, you're improving your life, you're getting the value that you need out of this process. So churches, especially local churches, are a prime definition of networks, yes? Yeah, in many ways, you know, I mean, some are functional, some are dysfunctional,

but they clearly build social ties. They build communications. They have shared resources. The network my mother used to, you know, in my neighborhood, my mother built a network and, you know, she could pull together tomorrow if you're like we're going to have 60 people over she can make phone calls and there'd be lasagna there'd be entrees everything would show up drinks you know you can pull that together why because she's invested in that network over 40 years in the same house and neighborhood so let me ask you this so we do those things now but we do them for green bay packer minnesota viking football games but we're going to need to do them on much more serious issues in the not too distant future how do we build network

I mean, my work is based on awareness and sharing information and knowledge, but very soon we're going to need to be action and change oriented. But given what I've learned from you on this short conversation, people don't really need to know about oil depletion statistics or the climate scenarios or these things. They just need to start building networks. And the networks themselves, if they exist, will pay. dividends in the future, no matter what future transpires. So what blanket advice do you have for listeners right now? Well, you said, root for the underdog, get started on a network locally to help

people that are the victims or in need. I mean, what else can you suggest? Or do I have that mistaken? No, no, I think you're right. I mean, I think, you know, my perspective is cultural capital is worth more than financial capital. Agree. Because social capital is worth more than energy capital. As long as basic needs are mad. I think those network capitals are a basic need. I've seen it in examples, you know, like they've unhook water to stay connected. The second or third thing people ask for when they get off of a boat is the ability to kind of let people know that they're safe, find out what's going on, look at any refugee camp, you know, their Wi-Fi spots or other pieces, and they're crowded, you know, in the Congo, they would go to mass for three hours just to sit. And,

next to the generator to plug enough phone so they can see what the prices are on the fish. Like connection is like we need to stop thinking that that's an extra. It is part of our superorganism now. Well, and it's also that we live in a culture right now that if you have enough electrons in the bank or linen bills in your wallet, you can pay for the things that networks normally would give you in our historical tribal environment for free. and that era may be ending relatively quickly. I think the shift is how do we take that to a strategy level?

How do we see the Office of Civic Engagement in the White House actually leading every initiative around how does this program, this investment that we're making, whether it's a task break or an incentive program or a field program? How is this building social ties among people? How are the programs crafted to capture positive network effects? Because they're not. That doesn't happen. You know, cities start with it. I think there's some countries in Europe that are doing some of this stuff. But I think this idea of creating network power and network capacity and network resiliency

among the people in the country is a strategic investment as much as our roads. And it's actually more important given the size and the nature of the threats facing us. We had a community organizer as the president of our nation for eight years. Wouldn't you have thought that some of this network knowledge and scaling it in our nation would have transpired? Yeah. I mean, I think they, I'm very curious around the thinking on that. You know, you can go to Washington, D.C. I live here.

You can go down the capital, which is the largest, one of the largest tourist spots in the world. there's no place for people to kind of facilitate discussions with each other. We're actually, we don't use our greatest place to like bring people together to talk directly with each other. That seems like a lost opportunity to me. Is part of that due to the just sheer size of 320 million people in our country and the type of things that you're discussing work better at smaller scales? I don't think so.

But if it's a core problem, if it's as core as, as the collapse of energy, if it's as core as the overinflation, why are we not spending more resource? Why are we not listening to the people who are working on its skill, you know, who are keeping peace? You know, what are the best examples? You know, that may be India's greatest export. You know, they know how to live alongside wildlife in a non-destructive way. Like, that cultural knowledge is invaluable. I think there are places where we can look at it and say, does this scale? And I think democracy in as true as for me is supposed to be that, is was an attempt at that. You know, my A game, what did 20 years of career enable me to

see that I can share with people? It's that these networks are not fuzzy. They're not amorphous. It's not let a thousand people, the thousand things bloom, that you can actually be very intentional. and with skills, you know, share the knowledge and apply technique to build an effective network to create social change. I think that that's the thing that I feel like my career and work has opened me to understand. And, you know, we want to have more network managers. We have a free field guide for network managers. You know, we have that stuff. We give it away. We try and get involved in more projects and helping people build these networks and build the skills that they need to manage networks.

So wait, you have a free field guide for network managers? Yeah, it's online. And so if we had tens of thousands of people around the nation read that and apply it to start networks in their communities, even, I mean, this was always why I favored local currencies because it wasn't as a replacement to the U.S. dollar. And it may not have been the most economically efficient thing. But what local currencies did is the proximate goal was, hey, we can pay a little bit of our utility bill or buy these tomatoes. But the ultimate benefit of the local currencies is it created ways of people to meet each other and exchange something and look in the face instead of just this disembodied electronic transfer of digits.

That's the exact same thing that's going on with voting. When we grew up voting was you stood in a line. There was a little neighbor who had volunteered for $2.2. and she checked you in. And then you got over to the thing and there was an old guy there who checked out your thing and you stepped in.

It was all manual. It was all a manual process run by people that you know and you could go down and grab them by the shoulder and say, what are you doing? You know, like it was, and it created trust in the process.

But it was inconvenient. It was slow. The networks couldn't get their votes tallied the same night because it was, you know, people counting stuff. So technological networks have suppressed our natural social

networks. No, I'm not saying that at all. I mean, I don't, I don't think it's an either or. I also know marginalized people who the technological networks are the bread and butter. They're the thing keeping them saying and they're the thing keeping them safe. So it's not an either or. Got it. If you live in a hostile community, your technological network is your network. Yeah. Okay. Marty, I have some closing questions for you that are a little bit more on the personal side, although there's been quite a bit of this conversation has been personal. Given your experience and your cheerful disposition, despite the difficult work you do, do you have any suggestions for people listening to this on how they can prepare themselves in their community

for what I refer to as a great simplification or an economically more disruptive and challenging time than our recent decades of experience. How do we meet the future halfway, in your opinion? I think folks on loving others. We're in a state where it's easy to see how self-destructive the superorganism is and focus on hating it, hating the separating. And I think that hating the other group,

and I think that's the wrong instinct. I think this idea that you could withdraw, build your own thing, isolate, cut off your connection to people is not the answer and that we're facing the end of an error you know like this this and all errors end and move on and sometimes it's hard to accept that transition but if we just kind of mourn the loss and then look ahead to what's next and say this inevitable I think that's key you know that's key to not being traumatized and this is traumatizing and immobilizing for a lot of people and it's happening to a lot so like

When you're traumatized, it requires incredible support to move ahead in healthy ways. You know, when they say hurt people, hurt people. You know, like, we're seeing that at a scale we've never, we haven't seen. So we are the energy to kind of fix that in our communities, in our social groups, and our families with our children, you know, and I think I think we really need to realize, like, that's not just nice words. Like, that's the pathway, you know. And I think that's how we meet this future halfway, is focus on that.

I agree with that. I don't know how to do it per se, but I agree with what you just said. What about young people? You've mentioned, and I agree with you, that young people hearing all of this, especially with climate and the longer term thing, because they're going to be life expectancy, 80 years, there's a lot going to happen in that timeline. What specific recommendations would you have for young humans who become a way? of our energy, environmental and biophysical constraints of our situation.

Be cheerful. But how can, if you tell someone to be cheerful, what's the mechanism by which they can be cheerful? For me, it's like knowing that the world is big, you know, spend, you visit any of the vast spaces like Wyoming, you know, or the ocean, the world is going to continue to spin and the world shifts all the time. That's not going away. Know what's not going away. Change is a lot easier to accept when you also understand what's not going away.

Know that where we are is not good. We don't want this. And, you know, what's next? You probably don't want it either. So wishing for stability is not what you want either as a young person. This is a nightmare. You know, this change is your friend. You know, something different is coming. And the question is. is can it be more just? Can it be better? And I think that's, that's key. The other thing that I would say to my kids, you know, say to younger people is power never moves voluntarily, you know, organize. We have a lot of big issues. We have the science. We know what needs to be done. And organize, organize, speak up. That's really important. I think when young people find this, this whole, you run into it sometimes. Like, you're not alone and you're not alone. And you're not the first. Like, it's really important. They feel like, oh, I'm the first person to seize this and be like, you're not alone. You're the first. Old folks like us have struggled with this and we're

eager to hand it off because, like I said, that I think it's an old Jewish thing. You know, it's not up you to finish the task, but it's not, you're not free to avoid it. This came upon us in our lifetime, you know, which is almost unbelievable that since 1960s or 70s is when this really emerged. We've been working on it. We can't avoid it, but we can't solve it in our lifetime. And it's just got to be part of their work, you know. So in addition to the oceans and Wyoming not going away, there are probably a lot of other things in our current economy and social structure that are not going away that are actually good things,

some of which you've mentioned on this conversation about social networks and human capital, etc. So there are a lot of good things that will probably remain about our daily lives. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I mean, the things that are not energy capital, the things that are not financial capital, the things are not propped up by either financial capital or energy capital. That's easy. Art, culture, history, books, you know, like tons of great stuff are going to, they're

going to be here. They're not going anywhere. Families. So I don't know you too well, Marty. We've spoken several times in the phone. but a personal question, what do you care most about in the world? My wife, my kids, my family, my friends, being helpful, serving others, you know, I think that's what I care about in the world.

I think on the broader sense, it's that other people have the opportunity to do that as well with equality, you know, like that's well said. Of all the things that we've talked about on this call and on other calls, what are you most concerned about in the coming 10 years or so? I'm concerned about that thing about, you know, hurt people, hurt people, that we might see that rise at scale and that we need to head on and address that challenge as soon as possible. How do you address that challenge? Do you heal the hurt people before they hurt people? I think you avoid hurting people. You know, you start investing in the things that help people deal with what's coming on all kinds of levels. and you know, you set up kind of programs and business models and things to address those challenges.

You know, I think telehealth is wonderful. I think, you know, scaling out grandma hands programs like they have in Philadelphia. There's so many kind of really interesting things about. I don't know what that is. Oh, this connection that you talked about, there's a program in Philly, that community health workers where they hire older, wiser women. to answer non-emergency room questions for other women in the community. So if you become stuck with a kid at 15 years old and whether you're a babysitter or it's yours

and the baby gets rozeola and you don't, you know, if you were part of a large extended functional family, you would be able to be like, hey, my baby has a rolyzeola and that's why their cheeks are red. But instead they rush in the emergency rooms and clog emergency rooms. So these community health workers are there to act like grandmothers. There's a program in North Carolina where they pay the elder, wiser people with some training to sit on a bench outside psychologist offers to actually stop people from needing to go through the whole psychology. They just sit there and listen. I mean, there are much more ways that we can use the network of people that we have to solve our problems. And I think

we just need to be much more creative about that and follow these good examples and scale them. Is there a list of all these things that are going on like these networks and maybe the, I mean, I read somewhere that when people see acts of altruism, they are more likely 300% more likely to be altruistic themselves. Maybe we need examples of these grandma networks in Philly and to highlight them nationally so other people know that these things exist and they might think of something that could apply in their own community.

I'm just throwing that out there because I'd never heard of these things. Yeah. No, I mean, I don't know if you watched, if you watched, I think the guy from the office, of course, because I'm from Scranton, I've got to mention the office. The guy from the office did a, program, I think it was called the Good News and it started during the pandemic. And he just covered these stories of health care workers going above and beyond and those kind of things. I don't know if there's a, you know, a central place. Yeah. But they're there. They get award

volunteer heroes and a lot of communities, you know, go to your local volunteers, you know, awards dinner. Well, you've, you've kind of answered this next question. But in contrast to what you're most worried about, what are you most hopeful about in the coming decade or so, given what you see in your work? I thought about it. I listened to some of your podcasts. I like, traffic jams. And you say, why?

Why? Why? Why? In the superorganism, they don't understand that it's like predictable chaos, you know, guaranteed uncertainty. Traffic jams move around. I live in Washington and there's a beltway. It's literally a circle.

And traffic jams move like an organism. It's literally the car's. leaving the traffic jammer going slower than the cars coming in. There's not an accident. There's nothing that actually happened is just this mass dynamic that shifts, that scientists really try and figure out and cannot. And I think, you know, when you think about the U.S., you can think about Black Lives Matter, say her name, you know, women's rights. We started as this crazy culture, you know, and I think America feels really shaky right now, but good people have been and continue to work to like make this the last gasp of hate.

The haters are, they're fighting for their survival under all criteria. Like the long view is, you know, the internet kind of screwed things up a little bit, but the long view is there's less of that shit going on. You know, and I think that makes me hopeful in the next decade. We may not win on my watch, but we will win. And I think internationally you look at like, you know, things that happened. I had a friend once who gave a speech in Atlanta. And he said, culture change happens.

And everybody's looking at it. My culture change. People are the same. He's like, everybody who raised, whoever made an ashtray in school, raise your hand. And everybody over 56 years old raised their hands. You know, everybody. Everybody made ashtrays in pottery class when they were a child. Everybody below that age didn't.

You know, when you think about growing up, people used to pour oil down the drain in their local storm drain when they changed the oil in their cars. That doesn't happen. Like culture shift happens and that gives me hope. Internationally, like the end of footbinding, you know, the end of slavery, like Barry the Change was a book that gave me a lot of confidence. The whole idea that human rights was only invented in 1948. 1948 is the first time that term starts to show up. There's a book. I think it's by a Stanford professor who talked about the evolution of human rights. That's where I'm hopeful. But again, I'm not always sure that hope is the right word. for me on the environment, you know, or energy. I think it's too tied to optimism. Yeah. It's more resolve and it's an outlook. I appreciate your sentiment on that. So I usually close with the question if you were benevolent dictator and there was no

personal recourse to your decision, what is one thing you would do to improve human and planetary futures? And you can answer that, but also I'll give you an alternative option. And if you were the advisor to the government agency, you mentioned, the counsel on civic engagement or something like that, either one of those. If you had that authority to make changes, what sort of things would you recommend or do? I would require consent and consensus with those that are impacted. You know, they demand it. So many of our problems would have been prevented or avoided if we listened to all.

all and work towards consent before we proceeded. We work on health of harm. And like I said, there's not a project anywhere going on hydrogen, carbon piping, all these, all these things. Like, people are raising the flags right now. The science isn't done. There's people getting douse, potentially sick. That would slow everything down. It would just slow everything down and give us a chance, raise flags about environmental justice, raise flags about pollution. So I would definitely require consent. You can't just move ahead without consent. Without consent. those impacted. Did you see what was announced yesterday? The UK announced that they were repealing their ban on fracking. And whether there's consent or not, they need the energy because

their prices are skyrocketing. So at some point, will we even have consent when our economies are demanding X, Y, and Z? I don't know. It's an open question. I mean, I think, well, you said, You said, no recourse, you know. Oh, yeah. So the UK would not be able to do that. You know, war would not happen, you know. You know, like things that don't, that injure too many people would not. Some people would understand, like, hey, I got to take some risk for, in order to save, save other people.

Like, that happens all the time. We are a colony species. That happens, you know. But I think it would force us to think about education and invest in different ways about where leadership comes from. I mean, you gave Joan, you gave Joan $100 million to spend on her questions. So when you asked Joan this thing at the end of, you're like, hey, what would you do $100 million? They're like, oh, I'd move a million midwives to, and yoga and cooks and high school teachers and programmers to like from New York and California to Laramie, Wyoming.

And, and Alaska. And then the rest could go to Florida. And with those six Senate votes, I'd give DC a state and then I'd finally watch America fix itself. You know, I think it would be, it would be very doable to win quite a few just by moving some pawns around. You're much more optimistic than I am that a democratic leadership would solve our problems. I think our problems go deeper than left or right. And I think there's a lot of ideas that I philosophically completely agree with the left on.

but our problems are bio-physical in nature, and ultimately that's political, yes. I'm not sure it's right or left. It's that by remixing populations, you know, World War II, the Great Migrations, remixing populations, you get more sane decision-making of that sanity just right now happens to be, you know, maybe Democratic given the behavior and track record of the Republicans for the last six months. On the other hand, there's no way we get to. on a better path unless we get some sanity in our decision-making process.

Fully agree with that. And I don't know how to do that. And maybe building networks is exactly how we do that. Building networks and mixing populations. Is that what you just said? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think that's a really big part of it. You know, you look at the fallout of the WPA program or even service in World War II, the millions of people that served. They made, you know, Civil Rights Movement, that was a really important point in their organizing. The bus boycotts where we remixed how people transported was really key in Montgomery to kick it off the civil rights. It created much stronger networks among the people working on the issue because they were now in small cars and figuring out how to get across town and then also doing civil rights organizing during the thing. It just brought in tons of power, tons of capacity to be able to create change.

We need to do that on a national level. on an international level. Is there anything else you'd like to offer our listeners closing thoughts, advice, wisdom? It comes from my mother, you know, who had tough kids and at times probably a tougher husband. And she advises us to focus on what you love. You know, if you focus on what you hate about someone every day, you will surely fall apart. If you focus on what you love about someone, you fall more in love every day. And I think her

advice has been the strength for her happy lifetime marriage with my dad. It's been mine as well for 26 years. And I think it's just as true for our neighborhood, our country, for humanity. And it's hard when things get so bad. But I think it's important to focus on what you love

about your fellow people. And the natural world. Because I love the natural world deeply. And that is what I try to focus on. And it does help me. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you, my friend.

To be continued and we'll put all your information in the show notes and I will talk to you soon. Nate, thank you so much for having me. It's a real, real honor to be here, especially given all the amazing other guests that you've had. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk with you. May your work scale and be impactful, Marty. Thanks again. If you enjoyed or learned from this episode of the Great Simplification, please subscribe to us on your favorite podcast platform and visit the great simplification.com for more information on future releases.