An Army of Normal Folks - Seth Kaplan: Repairing America One Zip Code at a Time (Pt 1)

Episode Date: September 3, 2024

Seth is a leading expert on fragile states across the world. And after a lot of people have asked him if America has become a fragile state, Seth dove into it. The result is his powerful book Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code At A Time.  Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're relationship poor. We've gone from relationship rich or social wealth, social richness, to what I would call social poverty. When you see all those people dying from suicides and drugs, and there's a lot of factors in there but honestly suicides globally have been going down and they've been going up in the United States. Yes there's a problem of drug cartels and supply of drugs and fentanyl but honestly the number of people who are, if you speak to a guy like Sam Keenonis who writes these great books on the drug crisis in America,

he will tell you the loss of community is underlying it all. 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've been a football coach in inner city Memphis and somehow that last part led to an Oscar for the film about our team. That movie is called Undefeated. I believe our country's problems will never be solved by a bunch of fancy people in nice suits talking big words that nobody understands on CNN and Fox but rather by an army of normal folks.

Us. Just you and me deciding, hey maybe I can help. Seth Kaplan is a leading expert on fragile states across the world And after a lot of people have asked him if America has become a fragile state, well, Seth dove into it with the result being his powerful book, Fragile Neighborhoods, Repairing American Society, one zip code at a time. Y'all, this is fascinating. I cannot wait for you to meet Seth

right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. It was December 2019 when the story blew up. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, former Packer star Kabir Bajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation. Hey GB, explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play. A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian, now cut off from his family

and connected to a strange arrest. I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. I got swept up in Kabir's journey but this was only the beginning in a story about faith and football, the search for meaning away from the gridiron and the consequences for everyone involved. You mix homesteading with guns and church and a little bit of the spice of conspiracy theories that we liked. Voila! You got straight away.

I felt like I was living in North Korea, but worse, if that's possible. Listen to Spiral'd on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much?

Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life

by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For decades, the mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people.

However, one murder of a crime boss sparked a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the mob. It sent the message that we can prosecute these people. Discover how law enforcement and prosecutors took on the mafia and together brought them down. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and I Heart Radio, this is Law and Order Criminal Justice System.

The first two episodes drop on August 22nd. Plus, did you know that you can listen to the episodes as they come out completely ad free? Don't miss out. Subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel today, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Smoky the bear. Smoky.

Then you know why Smoky tells you when he sees you passing through. Remember, please be careful, it's the least that you can do. Force is what you decide. Don't play with matches. Don't play with fire. After 80 years of learning his wildfire prevention tips, Smokey Bear lives within us all. Learn more at SmokeyBear.com. And remember, only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service,

your state forester and the Ad Council. Our iHeart Radio Music Festival, presented by Capital One, coming back to Las Vegas. Two nights, September 20th and 21st, on one stage. Stream live only on Hulu, a weekend full of superstar performances,

never seen before collaborations. And once in a lifetime artist moments you'll have to see to believe. Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Don't miss Asap Rocky, Big Sean, Camila Cabello, Dogecat, Dua Lipa, Gwen Stefani, Halsey, Hoseyar, Keith Urban, New Kids on the Block, Paramore, Shaboosie, The Black Crows, The Weeknd, Thomas Redd, Victoria Monet, a special performance by Coldplay's Chris Martin and more. Get your tickets to be there now at AXS.com. Seth Kaplan, welcome to Memphis. Great pleasure to be here. Where did you come from?

Where did you fly in from? I flew in from Reagan Airport, welcome to Memphis. Great pleasure to be here. Where'd you come from? Where'd you fly in from? I flew in from Reagan Airport, Washington DC. Washington DC. Nation's capital. Got it. I was just there visiting my son and word to the wise, if you rent a car there

and you gotta turn it in before you leave, add extra time because the car thing there is just insane. It can be insane. It's nuts. It is a city that's known just insane. It can be insane. It's, it's, it's not. If there's a city that's known for bureaucracy, it is Washington DC. So I, I would, I guess I should have assumed that the bureaucratic approach to rural car return would be arduous. All right. So Seth Kaplan, everybody, he's the author of Fragile Neighborhoods, Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time,

which we are certainly gonna get to, as well as a bunch of his other work. And one question I have for you, which you cannot answer now, but we will integrate later, which is why in the hell you wrote this book in the first place, but don't tell me, don't answer yet. Don't answer. Don't answer yet. Because I think for perspective, I found it very interesting. The work you have done that led up to writing it.

And so I want you to reveal to everybody why after we talk about the work first. why after we talk about the work first. Y'all, Seth is really just kind of dumb guy. He's a leading expert on fragile states. He's a professional lecturer at the Paul H. Nits, or Nitsy School of Advanced International Studies. Basically he's a professor at Johns Hopkins. He's a senior advisor for the Institute of Integrated Transitions, IFIT,

and a consultant to multilateral organizations such as the World Bank, the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and OECD, as well as developing country governments and NGOs. It's a mouthful. We can just pass it by. It's a bunch. developing country governments and NGOs. It's a mouthful, we can just pass it by. It's a bunch. It's a mouthful. You're just one of these guys letting the day pass you by.

Yeah, too many, so we can just skip that part. That's right, and he likes plums and coffee because I just watched him eat that. I like healthy eating. I like healthy eating. So, that's who you are. And then you wrote this book, which is why I really gained interest

in what you had to say. But first, before we even get to why you wrote the book, what the book's about that I think unfolds an enormous amount of data points that really aligns with my ethos. Explain to us what fragile is and some of the work you've done in places like Afghanistan and I think Nigeria to give us a basis for where we're going with your book and as it pertains to our culture here in the US.

So for me, fragile is a, could be a community, could be a society, could be a state group of people that have very weak cohesion. They have a hard time working with each other or they could be isolated from each other and they have no institutions to bring them together. So imagine I work on Nigeria. It's one of the countries I've worked on for many years. Here's a country, about 240 million people. Has few pockets that do well, mostly in the southern part of the country.

But the state doesn't work well. It had an awful civil war in the late 60s. A few million people died, a few million. That's a lot of people. The country was much smaller then. And it's a country in which mostly the government institutions don't work. And all over the country, there's lots of disputes over who is this my land? Is this my mine? Is this my resource? Whatever it might be between ethnic or religious groups or sometimes political actors, sometimes armed actors, and there's no way to resolve the conflict. So a fragile state, in terms of big picture, we can talk about a fragile

neighborhood, is a place in which you're basically unstable. It's built into the way this place is because of the lack of cohesion, lack of institutions. It's just unstable. So what you get is you get violence, you get social disorder, you get underdevelopment, not large, who wants to invest money when you have that condition? You all have brain drain.

So you have loads of problems and roughly if you look at the world, the world is about 200 countries. About one third of them are fragile. I was just about to say. About one third. So a good part of Africa, but not all. Few parts of Latin America, lots of the Middle East,

and then bleeding into places like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma, places like that. You got about one third of the world's countries that are in my, in my, in my bucket, so to speak. That you call fragile. That are fragile. I work on, I work on. And I hear you say that. And I think of Somalia. I think of a very nice country, by the way, but no government.

I spent some time there. I've seen pictures of Somalia many, many, many years ago. There were coastal areas that were vacation areas and beautiful. I mean, there's pockets of stability, but not because of the central government. There's maybe an ethnic group, in this case, a clan that is very cohesive. And that part of the country works relatively well, but the country as a whole, there's no government. Which is, which is like, like you said, Afghanistan, places like Somalia, in South America,

you know, is now, would you now call Argentina? Maybe not Argentina, but what's a South American country? Central South America, Haiti is the best example of the Western Hemisphere. No government. You have many countries in this part of the world. They aren't nearly as fragile as some of the examples I gave. But you can look at places in Central America.

I mean, Colombia. Colombia is a country with a pretty strong government, yet it doesn't control all of its territory. Again, fragile countries often have mountains and jungles and the government maybe even if it's got some strength, it can't penetrate. Look at Venezuela today. Look at the problems of Ecuador, Peru, even though they're a bit stable. They're not so stable. Think of the Central America. We have a lot of countries that I would say aren't nearly as bad with the exception of Haiti, but have lots of elements of, of being fragile.

Okay. And you say you work there. I don't work in all these countries, but there's like a group of people that are so we specialists thinking about these things. I work on a few of these countries and I've been doing work on big picture thinking in all these countries. Have you worked in Afghanistan? I worked on Pakistan.

I don't work in Afghanistan, I worked on Pakistan. Okay, so the reason I ask is, interestingly to me, and this is a completely uninformed comment, so butcher me if I'm wrong, but- I got my knife out. Yeah, you got your knife out. Or you can say, yeah, Bill, that's about right. It feels so many of these countries, the little bit I've read about them,

is they're all in some way really tribal. And in that tribleness, okay, I'm talking to a professor from Johns Hopkins, and I just used the word tribal-ness, okay, I'm talking to a professor from Johns Hopkins and I just used the word tribal-ness. I don't even, Alex, Google that real quick, see how big of an idiot I am. But the tribal, the culture of tribal cohesion

means that there is very little, if your country is made up of five or six or seven or eight or nine or whatever different tribes or clans, that your identity is central to that tribe and that clan rather than the commonwealth at large, is it not then inherent that you are going to have tons of conflict? Well, so there's a couple of issues there.

So tribalness is, I don't think we would use that term, but it's a good term. What's the term? I mean, again, every place is different. So you have ethnic, you have religious, clan, you even have regional divisions. So it's a form of you could say it's like I would call it fragmentation. Because society is fragmented into pieces, what brings it together? If you have strong institutions, and we all accept the institutions like

you know we have courts, we have government that will distribute resources fairly, will arbitrate disputes fairly. Well, maybe we're different, but we can accept the rules. The real problem of makes a place fragile, we're fragmented, or fractured, and there's no rules we agree upon. Therefore, we all have a reason and incentive to fight for power, therefore the violence. So Afghanistan is a pretty good example. The main way you get stability is by repressing. You basically have a group of people,

which is what you have now, the Taliban. They can agree among themselves on what is an acceptable order and they repress everybody else. That's where you end up. That's not ideal. I don't advertise that. But places like Syria, the moment you released the power of the government, you had a vicious civil war and you had hundreds of thousands of people die. And it wasn't just the government against the civil war and you had hundreds of thousands of people die. And it wasn't just the government against the opponents of the government.

There were four or five or six, who knows how many different groups all fighting each other. It was like chaos. It was chaos. So that's the best- Well, the Middle East at large is that. It's not everywhere.

Turkey is not so much like that. Okay, well, I almost think of Turkey as a- Egypt is not so much like that. Egypt is more or less, it looks like it looked 4,000 years ago. So, but like Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, I mean, these countries, a lot of the countries, Saudi Arabia to a lesser extent. Libya, I work on Libya. It could be tribal, it could be ethnic, it could be religious, but it's just fractured and nothing brings people together unless you're repressing your opponent, to be honest. Well, and in some, it sounds like those...

Really hard to fix. This problem is not... You cannot fix this problem in anything but many generations. That's the key thing to remember. The thing is though, the categories that you say leads to fragility to me seem like they overlap. I mean, you've got religious and tribal in some cases. I work in part of Nigeria.

We chose that place because it was religious and tribal, the most fractured part of the whole country. That's the actual work in that part of the country. But to your point, this all leads to war, violence. Violence, in many cases, it's low level violence. War is the worst case. But okay, let's just say violence. Yes. Well, when people are putting all their energy, money and effort into violence,

they're not putting their energy effort into development and investment and economic. So you could argue then that fragility also leads to poverty, disenfranchisement, suffering. Yes, I think totally. These things are all related, which will lead you to believe that a prerequisite for any country to be successful is enough social cohesion

or enough good institutions that people can work together, accept differences, accept winners and losers, and believe in the future. So if a country doesn't have enough cohesion or some institutions, it's not going to work. And that's always been my conclusion. So part of my work is always what mechanisms can we create, whether it's more cohesion or it's some mechanism where people will work together because they accept some rules or some institutions

that allow them to move forward together. That's the key issue that I work on constantly. One of those two entry points and then you could break it in the different ways. Because if you don't have both, you have chaos basically. And now a few messages from our generous sponsors. But first, I hope you'll consider signing up to join the Army at normalfolks.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. Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast, Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more, because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or

wherever you get your podcasts. It was December 2019 when the story blew up. In Green Bay, Wisconsin, former Packer star Kabir Vajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation. Hey, GB, explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play. A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian, now cut off from his family and connected to a strange arrest.

I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite. I got swept up in Kabir's journey, but this was only the beginning in a story about faith and football, the search for meaning away from the gridironiron and the consequences for everyone involved. You mix homesteading with guns in church and a little bit of the

spice of conspiracy theories that we liked. Voila! You got straight away. I felt like I was living in North Korea, but worse, if that's possible. Listen to Spiraled on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. For decades, the Mafia had New York City in a stranglehold, with law enforcement seemingly powerless to intervene. It uses terror to extort people. However, one murder of a crime boss sparked a chain of events that would ultimately dismantle the mob. It sent the message that we can prosecute these people.

Discover how law enforcement and prosecutors took on the mafia and together brought them down. These bosses on the commission had no idea what was coming their way from the federal government. From Wolf Entertainment and I Heart Radio, this is Law and Order Criminal Justice System. The first two episodes drop on August 22nd. Plus, did you know that you can listen to the episodes

as they come out completely ad free? Don't miss out. Subscribe to the I Heart True Crime Plus channel today, available exclusively on Apple podcasts. Smokey the bear. Then you know why Smokey tells you when he sees you passing through. Remember, please be careful, it's the least that you can do. Don't play with matches. Don't play with fire.

After 80 years of learning his wildfire prevention tips, Smokey Bear lives within us all. Learn more at SmokeyBear.com. And remember, Only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forestry and the Ad Council. Our I Heart Radio Music Festival,

presented by Capital One, coming back to Las Vegas. Two nights, September 20th and 21st, on one stage. Stream live only on Hulu, a weekend full of superstar performances, never seen before collaborations, and once in a lifetime artist moments you'll have to see to believe.

Tickets are on sale now at AXS.com. Don't miss Asap Rocky, Big Sean, Camila Cabello, Dogecat, Dua Lipa, Gwen Stefani, Pauzy, Hozier, Keith Urban, New Kids on the Block, Paramore, Shaboosie, The Black Crows, The Weeknd, Thomas Redd, Victoria Monet, a special performance by Coldplay's Chris Martin and more. Get your tickets to be there now at AXS.com. As I listen to you and again, this is uninformed me hearing you out, listening to you. It seems to me you can even have regional fragility that is greater than even the boundaries of a country, because I look at Russia and Eastern Europe and Ukraine seems to me,

the Russia Ukraine thing seems to me to be part of fragility because there's one group of people Russia who think something about the breadbasket of Eastern Europe, Ukraine, as having always been part of Russia and then you have people in Ukraine who are devout about their independence and that lack of cohesion then leads to fragility. Well, to keep the concept bounded, to keep the concept within limits, we mostly think about it in terms of a place. So at a country level or within a community, I think in that sense fragility makes sense. When you talk about inter-country war, I mean think World War II, we fought the Nazis, We fought the Japanese. I don't think we would call that fragility. That's simply fighting for for territory, for power, for resources.

So I see the distinction. That's really not. I mean, I mean, I was in I had to say I was in Ukraine in December. Incredibly cohesive country, incredibly great experience. It's hard to believe that the energy, the dynamism in this place, that the talent that rises in the war to lead the country is compared to some of the talent that rises to lead our country, quite a contrast, because I don't think they would be surviving without the right talent. But I would just say that it's quite different in that respect.

And but I would just say that it's it's quite different in that respect. And I wouldn't say I wouldn't consider most inter-country war situations to be fragility. I mean, it can be spillover. Look at the Middle East. The problems in Syria spill over into Lebanon, the problems of Iraq spill over to Syria, the problems in the Sahel part of Africa. They all spill over into each other. So that can be fragility crossing boundaries, but just two countries fighting for land. I wouldn't consider that fragility. That's simply,

that's simply humanity's long standing fight for power and resources, which we see throughout history. And good. So that distinction I think matters. And good. So that distinction, I think, matters. All right, so. And I'll say that the fact that you focus on the, when you focus, you say you're not an expert. I would say what makes my work always has been different is that the experts, often the people who study this stuff,

or the people who often lead these organizations, they often are looking for a technical answer or a policy answer. And you go to the heart of the matter that it's actually the tribalism that divides people. And for me, that's always been obvious, but it's not necessarily what a lot of people think about these places. But it does seem obvious. It does seem obvious. I lived among the people. I lived in homes and everything, and it's just so obvious, but it's not obvious if you're the United Nations or if you're some government agency trying to help the place, there's an assumption they all can be like us.

And I think that's part of the failure. People are not all like us. Well, that's a bureaucracy that slows down enterprise, rent a car in the Washington airport. Yeah. Well, if those people were working on it, probably that would be the result. Yes. All right. Yeah. I mean, unfortunately, I think a lot of times we miss common sense. But to me, you know, we're human beings. There's still some very primal stuff that's part of our DNA. And we were at the onset of mankind clannish. And I think part of intellectual, emotional and societal maturity and intelligence

is being able to see past your clan at the humanity of the other clan. And it seems to me that when you lack that capability, lead to tribalism and thus fragility. Now there is a really uninformed person's synopsis, but it feels like that has some validity to it. I would say yes, except if you think of nationalism, and I'm thinking of a positive version of nationalism,

because it doesn't always mean positive, but as humans, it does help if we belong to groups. We recognize our membership in groups. I mean, my work in America is very much focused on the fact is that we've lost our communities. Oh, spoiler alert. I'm spoiler alert. You're jumped.

I'm jumping, but if you think about it on a national level, the real challenge is how to translate the tribalism of the ethnic group to the tribalism of the nation. Because to the extent that people are loyal to the country, they will sacrifice to make their country better. They will build institutions, they will make the investments, they will stop being corrupt. That is the way out of fragility, but it's a different form of tribalism, but I would say a tribalism that benefits the country. Right, but that provides that you see yourself as a member of a big tent tribe versus these much smaller groups

we seem to divide ourselves into. But hang on before you go there. So that gives everybody listening a really, really cool background for some questions that you were asked, which I think precipitated you writing a book. Yes. Tell me about that. Well, I wrote, I wrote this book. I mean, if you went to Washington, DC, even today, if you go, most people will know me as the fragile States person.

Not many people go around. That's probably not because they think I'm in a fragile state. Some people, some people might say that. I have kids, if you ever see me with some of my kids, my middle kid, who's just about to turn six, a boy who's the best at destroying the house. And so you can, you can see me in those moments. Yeah, I'm thinking yesterday morning, trying to get him to learn a little bit of reading that we have a little bit every day we try to learn. And he really had me in a fragile state. So we could talk about that.

I felt this is the hardest thing. Helping a country is not as hard as taking care of your kids sometimes. So, but I'll just say that 2015, 2016, everybody knows me, fragile states person. And then over and over again, I was being asked, is America becoming a fragile state? I thought people-

That's, hold on, time out. That is so fascinating that we have arguably the strongest country on earth and arguably the most impressive advent of a Republic in the history of humankind. Yet you are being asked if we're a fragile state. That to me speaks volumes about our national concern for ourselves. Just the question itself is telling.

Yes. I mean, I took it as partly in jest and partly a product of deep anxiety. And it didn't happen once. It happened seven or eight times. Again, I'm in Washington where people are thinking, they're thinking a little bit different than somebody might be thinking elsewhere in the country. But the fact is they were looking at our election. They were looking at what is going on. Let's be honest, it's tied to what was going on in that election cycle. They were nervous. And here we are, we are actually not a fragile state. And one of the easiest ways to look at a fragile state is are people coming or are people going? A country that's very fragile

will have people trying to leave. And here we are in the United States where if you fully open the door, you would have millions if not tens of millions of people coming across the border or flying into our airports. So we are not viewed as being fragile. We have great technology, we have great companies, great institutions.

Our constitution has run uninterrupted and I love to remind Americans, whenever they ask me, am I worried? I tell them to recall the 1864 election, when we were in the middle of this deep, deep civil war and we still ran an election and Lincoln almost lost. And so we don't, we don't stop our elections and our system works for all of its flaws and all the things we want to complain about it. And so for me, we're anything but fragile, except people are seeing things in this

country that scare them, that they can't understand. And I know they're thinking politics, but if you ask me, politics are always downstream from society. If you wanna know what's wrong in society, look at the drug overdoses, look at the anxiety, look at the loneliness, look at the mistrust, look at the people screaming at each other. It's a little crazy, and it does tell you

that something is ill in our society. And so that's the journey I set off. I set off like I do anytime I go to a country. I wandered, I read lots of books. I mean, dozens of books. My wife did not want that extra bookcase in the living room, but I have a whole bookcase of books, just the research, whatever the 50 books I read and whatever books I at least looked at, but then buy. And I wandered the country. I mean, for me, learning a place is not about

only intellectual. There needs to be a synthesis between intellectual and getting out there and being amongst the people. So that means going to lots of places, talking to lots of people, hearing people out, and then finding your way to where you think you can be most valuable and where you think the source of the problem is. Always society is upstream from politics. If people tell you something's wrong with their politics, ask them, what do you think is wrong with our society? So that question is what led you to write the book.

Yes, it led me to write the book. Yes, it led me to write the book and the big difference between- And the question to be clear is, hey, you're the fragile guy. You're the fragile nations guy. You're the one who studies it and talks about it at Johns Hopkins and all these other places from the World Bank to the Institute for Integrated Transitions and the US State Department. So you're kind of like the fragile state, fragile area guy thing. You get asked, are we becoming fragile or are we fragile? And you, because you're asked that over and over again, decide to write Fragile Neighborhoods, Repairing American Society One Zip Code at a Time,

the title itself, you say to me, America's not fragile, but the title itself says we could be if we don't fix it. Well, yes, if we continue on our current path, I think our problems will get worse and worse. Having said that, when I look at the country as a whole, my worry is not the type of tribalism I see in Nigeria or Libya or Somalia. I see something much closer to home. If you go to those countries, there's a stark difference between the local and the national. When you go local, you see such close bonds, you see strong community at the local level,

you see lots of people cooperating, helping each other, knowing each other, trusting each other. What they lack is something above the local. And when you come to America and you take a step back and you think we have all these social problems, I mean, we could just list out 10 social problems. I touched upon a few and we have to ask ourselves two generations ago, we did not have these problems. We had other problems.

We, the country has never been perfect. I have problems of race, problems of inequality. We go on and on with our problems. We had other problems. The country has never been perfect. We had problems of race, problems of inequality. We go on and on with our problems, but we didn't have the types of social problems we have now two generations ago. So given that for me, the single most important lens when you want to go and understand a country, you got to look at the relationships. I'm a big believer in relationships. I'm a big believer in the social will tell us of the bigger picture.

And so whenever I go to a country, I'm looking at how are the relationships, what are the nature of how people are treating each other, locally, nationally, different parts of society. And in America, you have to ask what has changed in two generations to our relationships that have created this whole slew of problems. And to me, that is where I go to the neighborhood

because I believe the biggest difference is not national. We see the end result nationally, but the big difference is the emptying out, the voiding out almost of so many local institutions and relationships since that many of us, we live on a desert island called our house and we have nothing that brings us together. So we don't spend time with other people. It's even worse with the phones, but it started long before the phones.

We'll be right back. Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast, Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number We'll be right back. this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition? Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging

into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It was December 2019 when the story blew up in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Former Packer star Kabir Vajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation. Hey, GB explaining what he believes led to the arrest of his friends at a children's Christmas play. A family man, former NFL player, devout Christian, now cut off from his family and connected

to a strange arrest. I got swept up in Kabir's journey, but this was only the beginning in a story about faith and football, the search for meaning away from the gridiron, and the consequences for everyone involved. You mix homesteading with guns and church and a little bit of the spice of conspiracy theories that we liked, voila, you got straight away. I felt like I was living in North Korea, but worse, if that's possible.

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Thomas red Victoria Monet a The Black Crows. The Weeknd. Thomas Redd. Victoria Monet. A special performance by Coldplay's Chris Martin. And more. Get your tickets to be there now at AXS.com. As I read through some of your stuff, and I want you to add color to it and add to them because I'm sure I'm missing some. In 2022, more than 200,000 people died from alcohol, drugs or suicide. Suicide rates rose by 35% just the last two decades,

higher than any other country on earth. I think probably the developed world. Developed world. I don't know about all over the country. By 2022, the rates of deaths of despair among middle-aged blacks had nearly tripled for 100,000. 12% of the elderly population is having issues. 12th graders, 50% hung out with their friends almost daily,

dropped to 25% by 2017. Here's one that shocked me. It shouldn't have shocked me, but I get why it's so important. 30% of people eat family dinner regularly. Only 30% now. And it had to have been 70% 25, 30 years ago. But I'm gonna, so that's some.

Build on that. What I'm saying is before we go on to what I agree completely with you, which is the relationship change, let's make the case with the data points to our listeners to understand really what has changed the last 20 years, more of those or expand upon those. Okay. First, I would say when I talk about neighborhoods, I think we could talk about there's two sources of fragility that I'm focused on. One of them is that there are many neighborhoods

and even parts of the United States in which simply because you live there, you are greatly disadvantaged. I would say, yes, we continue to have lots of problems with race, but actually the data says now that your place based inequality, some of that is race, but not all of it, is greater. So what I mean is if you're in Eastern Kentucky, if you're in some of the worst neighborhoods in Memphis, and some parts of, I don't know, Native American reservations, you know, you

could go some parts of the world, South, whatever it is. There are literally, there's a place-based inequality that's affecting tens of millions of Americans. And those places are literally disconnected from everything. And so that is, and in fact, what has happened dramatically since 1970 is people who are better off move to some neighborhoods and they leave basically, and we're concentrating the poor people and

concentrating disadvantaged groups in particular places. So if you hear people being frustrated and angry over what is going on in this country, it's partly because we don't live together anymore. We live separate and that is true everywhere in this country, it's partly because we don't live together anymore. We live separate, and that is true everywhere in the country. Do you think school busing and some of that also played a role in that? Because I do. We could talk about it. I'm in general favor of neighborhood schools,

because neighborhood schools are one of the best incubators of community. Me too, so when you take kids out of your neighborhood, bus them all the way. We can talk about that. Of course, if you were going to do that, you would have to make a much stronger effort to ensure that every school was good. And so that could, that could have been an alternative approach. And I can see, you know, when it comes to issues that are very political, I can see both sides of the story and I

don't want to privilege one over the other. But if you're thinking about it from a community lens, clearly neighborhood schools have a lot of benefits, especially if the schools are good. Because good schools attract people to good neighborhoods and what we do now is we actually chase the most talented people out of bad neighborhoods because we encourage them. We help a few people and they leave. And we even think of moving up is moving out.

And that means that we're concentrating everyone else who didn't get in the game, so to speak, in these places, and we're making it harder to make them better. So that's one whole area I'm talking about. And you have a lot of practical life experience in this area. You're exactly right. People who raise themselves up, vanish and it leaves food deserts

and it leaves schools without booster clubs because of people that are, or parental involvement in school, because the people who can leave. And so it perpetuates this downward propulsion of these difficult areas, because the money and the talent continues to get sucked out of them to quote better areas.

And then the other thing that I think what you just said makes just unbelievably sense and agrees with what my practical experience is, is that as the community school breaks down and people start going to schools all over the place. When they come back to their homes, there is no sense of community. There's not a community. You got a Milan, Tennessee, we go to different schools. We don't know each other. Our parents don't know each other. You go to Milan, Tennessee, I, or McKinsey, Tennessee, I'll,

I can name you a hundred little towns all over West Tennessee that I have coached against in football. On Friday, the whole school, the whole city shuts down at like 2.30 and there's 3,000 people at the football games because all their kids go to that same high school. They have a strong community. They are so proud of their, and those kids grow up seeing the two generations above them shutting down their businesses on Friday night school and the games hanging out the flag

of the school in front of their and it perpetuates generationally a sense of community, a sense of pride in that community. Well, you go into more urban areas where people are shipped out, bussed out, shipped off, going to different schools, the talent and the money's being yanked out of those areas. You're taking the talent and money out, which perpetuates a lack of growth.

And then you're actually exporting people to different places when they do come back together. There is absolutely no community. Well, I mean, we have to understand why they started the busing. I mean, segregation left a heavy problem. So the busing, there was a logic to it. But I do believe if you're trying to make places succeed, you have to encourage investment.

That's not only financial investment, that means talent. You have to have a talent retention, a talent attraction strategy for a place to thrive. And to the extent that we encourage the best and the brightest to take their resources, to take their talent and to leave, we basically made those places worse. And then we did it over and over and over again

for 50 years. And so that's why you have many parts of cities that are doing so badly. And for me, the tragedy is all the people living there. And so the only way you're going to reverse that is by thinking about how do you encourage, you talk about supermarkets, you talk about local businesses, you talk about third places, places to go and meet people, cafes, strong local schools, housing that people wanna live in. If these neighborhoods would have those things,

maybe the cycle would be reversed and some of these neighborhoods would be attractive and over a period of time, the whole dynamic would shift. But again, it has to be, you have to love your neighborhood as people love their town and you have to have, you have to love your neighborhood as people love their town. And you have to have a lot of things in your neighborhood that are good that you want to build or invest your own energy in as well.

First of all, just a side note, I think there are hundreds of well-intentioned, originally designed policy and stuff that as our society develops sometimes either outlives their usefulness or needs tweaking. So don't misunderstand what I'm saying about that. But I get why. I am just saying in hindsight now,

you can certainly see how while what it was about originally certainly was a civil rights era issue that we were working hard at. We are a failed, we fail often, but one of the beautiful things about America is we keep trying. And so, you know, I get it. So don't misunderstand what I'm saying about busing. I'm just saying that if you think about community and some of our most impoverished, most needy communities, it also plays a role in it is all I'm saying.

I think so. I think we have a lot. The problem is we have ideas that ideas that we're right for a time that we don't change. We don't change our ideas because once the let's I hate to say it. Once the gravy train of the government starts up, it's really hard to get off the train. That's that's like a Washington expression when you want to get on the gravy train

because it never stops. Agreed. And so so, yeah., so if we talk about fragility, I think one thing is what we've done to some neighborhoods. Some of it is just market forces. If you were in Eastern Kentucky over these years, I mean, again, it is government policy and other things that played a role, but the economy became so bad because of the coal mines and everything else, everyone with talent left and you have a very depressing situation. So there's different places have different reasons, but we have a country that's very uneven in terms of who's thriving and

it depends a lot upon where you go to school, depends a lot about where you grow up, it depends upon what kind of work you have, and it hasn't been a country that's really fair for a lot of people and places. And so I buy that argument, I don't buy most of what people do about it. For me, the only way to do something about it is to make sure every place is a flourishing place.

Okay, so you said fragility is two sources. That's one, that's one. So the second- Greatly disadvantaged neighborhoods, which we've exhausted that. I get it. What's number two? So second one is what I think we talked about a little bit before about is the gross disconnection

that we've experienced. If you look at the data, let's give some data here. The peak is 1964. And then from 1964 until today today you have this downward trajectory in which people become more and more separated from one another. You talked about food deserts. I use this term called institutional deserts. You could be in a neighborhood and there's not a single neighborhood unique institution. If you go back two generations ago, you go to some small town that you might have mentioned, or if you go to

my neighbor, just think of my neighbor, my neighbor is incredibly flourishing. We have three of our own restaurants, we have a supermarket, we have a pharmacy a little bit less connected. We have places of houses of worship, we have civic associations. My oldest is in going to be in seventh grade, three quarters of her classmates live within walking distance of her house, which means she goes and visits them.

So we have community schools, community restaurants, community shopping, community places to worship. We have community civic associations. We have community, my daughter, she goes place clarinet. So there's like a music thing, not very big, not very impressive, but it's got like 20 kids from the neighborhood. My son goes to play sports, whatever soccer this time,

baseball that time, whatever it is, basketball, mostly people from the community. So you got loads and loads of these things going on. And that means that I know hundreds of people in my neighborhood. My neighborhood has a clear identity, we have like WhatsApp groups where we're sharing stories, and I could give you 100 stories from my neighborhood of people doing

things for each other. And just think how different that is than most of America right now. So this whole second thing is, is that we live in places where we have no reason and we have no opportunity and therefore we don't really have an inclination to know each other and we might have some network and some friends, but a lot of us are not good at that. And a lot of us become lonely, isolated. We're not practicing relationships. We're not working together to do anything to make the country better.

We all used to belong to something and we used to do something and now mostly we don't. And that to me is one of the tragedies of this age is how much we've disconnected us from each other. And so one of the big questions which I work on is how do you how do you build a society of connection of where each place matters and where every place has lots of opportunities, institutions for people to belong to contribute to build up the place. And if our country was like that, what would we think different about our place in our in our society? was like that, why would we think different about our place in our society? When I hear you talk about your neighborhood, I hear safety.

Yes, you feel safe because you can always, my daughter walks down like whatever 20 minutes, she has a problem. She just has to run up and knock on the door and there's a 50% chance that we will know the neighbor to be honest, even if it's 10, 15 minutes away. Under as low as hierarchy of needs, right below food, water and shelter. Safety. Yeah, safety. And it's ultimately what every human being wants. But it's it's also when I hear you talk about it from your children's perspective,

it's another kind of safety. I hear an emotional safety, emotional safety. So I'm going to let me give you an example. I'm going to give you an, um, I'll give you two stories, one, a personal story, one not so personal story is several years ago. My son was probably about a year, year and a half old. She's six now about to be six. And my daughter had carried him out of the car. Imagine the driveway walked up towards our front door, some cement and dropped him on it. And he landed on his chin. And imagine his chin is bleeding. And the two parents are

there. And like, this is awful. And you're immediately frightened as his whole life, you freak out. His whole life is ruined by his whole face is going to have a permanent scar. What does my wife do? My wife picks him up, doesn't speak to anybody and runs down the street. Doesn't call the ambulance. Doesn't call an ambulance, doesn't even tell me where she's going, comes back 40 minutes later, completely bandaged up. Why? She knew exactly where the closest nurse was. And as it turns out, well, the nurse about three blocks away, there's a nurse. And as it turns out, in our neighborhood, because we've had various challenges over the year, we must know at least

10 doctors, medical people, somebody that you can go to. I can recall whatever, that you can go to. I can recall whatever three, four weeks ago, I also have a baby. The baby was just throwing up. What do we do? How much do we worry about it? There's another nurse about half a block away. I think she's not practicing.

She wouldn't be someone we'd normally go to, but we just go to for this type of question. And she says, you better look at her, you better take her to urgent care. So then we go to urgent care, but now without making sure, you better take her to urgent care. So then we go to urgent care, but now without making sure we really need to go to urgent care. So I can think of lots of experiences like that,

where we just, practical needs, something, immediately we had, just, and you don't have to actually be friends with these people. That's the key. We think of friendship, and then we think of professional. And my neighbor, there's hundreds of people that I'm, some of them are friends, hundreds of them I just know. I might talk to them, I might say hello to them.

I might just say smile at them or whatever, good morning. But they're there and if somebody knocks on my door and I knock on their door, we're there for each other. And there's loads of little things. Let me give a second story. I was in Denver giving a talk. I think this is probably end of last October, November, something like that.

And I already finished my talk, middle of the daytime, and I'm hanging out at this whatever, one day, one half day conference, and waiting, I had a few hours before my flight. And I'm on these WhatsApp groups back in my neighborhood. I'm on like, whatever. I'm on a lot of them. Mostly I don't pay too much attention,

but there was one that came up and said, my child is missing. And the child wasn't so young, so she wasn't so worried, but had been missing for a while. And they were worried about it becoming nighttime. It was whatever it was, probably, I don't know, three, whatever the time was, I need help. And immediately about, you have texts back and forth, back and forth. They say, let's set up another WhatsApp group just to help. Volunteers please shift. And I'm there in Denver. I was not going to be helpful, but I was really curious.

So I joined this group and you had about 20 people crowded into this group and they merely says, we're going to go off and look for this kid. And they went off in every direction. So this is persons going here. We're surrounded three sides. We're surrounded by woods. There's a bunch of streets coming in, but we're surrounded by woods on three sides. And they were going off mostly into the woods to look some of them up the streets. And within 90 minutes, they find the kid and then they're texting,

I need help, I went too far, I'm a mile away, can somebody pick me up? And that whole story is done in several hours. Think what might have happened if she didn't have the neighbors, probably would have called the police. In the first case we would have called an ambulance or run someplace. So that these are great examples of when you have strong collectiveness and people are in a relationship with each other and they feel they're there for each other, it just transforms your life hundreds of times. Even in a daily or weekly basis I can give you stories of problems averted, problems solved, feeling of safety. I would even say a feeling of joy when you walk them.

Maybe it's the Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I feel a feeling of joy going down my street, not because I think things are perfect, but because I know who's behind the doors. I know I'm going to bump into a person. It just changes your whole perspective on life when you live in this type of neighborhood. And I believe this was the norm two generations ago for most people. And that concludes part one of my conversation with Seth Kaplan. And you don't want to miss part two that's now available to listen to.

Together guys, we can change this country. But it starts with you. I'll see you in part two. Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast, Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford and I've spent my career exploring the three pound universe in our heads. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life,

because the more we know about what's running under the hood, better we can steer our lives. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What happens when a professional football player's career ends and the applause fades and the screaming fans move on? I am going to share my journey of how I went from Christianity to now a Hebrew Israelite.

For some former NFL players, a new faith provides answers. You mix homesteading with guns in church, voila! You got straight away. They try to save everybody. Listen to Spiral on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Smokey the Bar's boy. Then you know why Smokey tells you when he sees you passing through.

Remember, please be careful, it's the least that you can do. Of course, it's what you decide. Don't play with matches, Don't play with fire. After 80 years of learning his wildfire prevention tips, Smokey Bear lives within us all. Learn more at SmokeyBear.com. And remember, only you can prevent wildfires. Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state

forester, and the Ad Council. Our I Heart Radio Music Festival, presented by Capital One, coming back to Las Vegas September 20th and 21st a weekend full of superstar performances ASAP Rocky, Big Sean, Camila Cabello, Doja Cat, Dua Lipa, Gwen Stefani, Halsey, Hozier, Keith Urban New Kids on the Block, Paramore, Shaboosie, The Black Crows, The Weeknd, Thomas Rhett Victoria Monet, Coldplay's Chris Martin, and more.

Stream live only on Hulu. And get tickets to be there at AXS.com. I'm Andrea Gunning, host of the all-new podcast There and Gone. It's a real-life story of two people who left a crowded Philadelphia bar, walked to their truck and vanished. A truck and two people just don't disappear. The FBI called it murder for hire. But which victim was the intended target and why?

Listen to There and Gone South Street on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.