An Army of Normal Folks - Seth Kaplan: Repairing America One Zip Code at a Time (Pt 2)

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.

Hey everybody, it's Bill Courtney with an Army of Normal, folks, and we continue now with part two of our conversation with Seth Kaplan 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 Vajabiamila caught up in a bizarre situation. Hey, G.B. 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. 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. Listen to Spiral 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you

wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsmen plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh.

Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the Weird Little Guys Trying to Destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys 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 iHeart True Crime Plus channel today, available exclusively on Apple podcasts. Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, host of Womanica, a daily podcast that introduces you to the fascinating lives of women history has forgotten.

This month, we're bringing you the stories of athletes. There's the Italian race car driver who courted danger and became the first woman to compete in Formula One. The sprinter who set a world record and protested racism and discrimination in the US and around the world in the U.S. and around the world in the 1960s. The diver who was barred from swimming clubs due to her race and went on to become the

first Asian-American woman to win an Olympic medal. She won gold twice. The mountaineer known in the Chinese press as the tallest woman in the world. And the ancient Greek charioteer who exploited a loophole to become the first ever woman to compete at the Olympic Games. Listen to Wamanica on the iHeartRadio app, Apple either you said or that you used as a point which is what Mother Teresa said, we think sometimes that poverty is only being hungry, naked, and homeless.

The poverty of being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for is the greatest poverty. And when you are alone and you don't feel part of a community and you don't have this connectivity, you can develop a feeling of being unwanted, unloved, uncared for as the greatest poverty. And that in and of itself, ironically to me, is fragile. Yes. I mean, we, we have become, we have gone from being resilient to fragile as a society, not because, I mean,

we hear about the polarization and the political parties. I see that. I don't think it's great, but it doesn't worry me very much. I'm much more worried about something deep that's happening in our society of this disconnection and the mistrust and isolation and the loneliness. When you look at, you gave some statistics before and I can actually, if we had a slide or something here, I would plot the health of Americans,

like the lifespan of Americans versus the lifespan of similar countries. And forget COVID, but they kept going up and up and up. And we, sometime from around 1980, began to go up less and less. And then we got to the, around 2010, we began to go sideways. And so there's actually a huge gap in terms of the wellbeing

of Americans and other people. And then you can say there's a lot of things on how we eat or our healthcare. But for me, the single greatest factor is we're relationship poor. We've gone from relationship rich or social wealth, social richness to what I would call social poverty. And this disc, 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, and 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. So I believe our disconnection and our, and our people just don't feel like the society is for them. They don't feel like they have hope. I think there's a lack of hope or optimism about the future. Big part of it is the way that places have been left behind and a big part of it is how we become disconnected from each other. So I'm talking about two different things,

but they're connected because they're both about disconnection. Places are totally disconnected and within lots of places, even if you have a nice house and you have a nice car and your career is okay, I think you're much more socially poor. And maybe those apps will help you. Maybe your bank account will help you.

But I think there's a lot less joy in those lives because we're much more socially poor than we were before. And that may not show up until you have a crisis, or that may not show up until you have a like a pause in your life or whatever that might be. But believe me, there's something that's affecting a lot more of us than just economic poverty. And this is all about disconnection. In fact, both issues are all about disconnection. As I listen to you, I think about the way I grew up versus the way my own children.

Where did you grow up? I grew up here. In Memphis. Yeah, I grew up in an apartment. We didn't have anything, but I can tell you what I did every day. We played hide and seek. We rode our bikes and played chips or cops and robbers.

On the street, around the corner. Around the corner. So I did. Played stick ball. We played kick the can. When my mother got sick of me, she threw me outside. And then when it was time to come home, as the sun came down, she would open the store

and scream, hey, come home. And you know what else would happen? There were 10 other mothers on stoops. So it was this chorus of mothers calling everybody home. And we have replaced that reality with video games. Now we don't even get, we had the beginnings of Atari but me and my friends would get around a TV with an Atari and play together. Now you put a headphone on and you cancel out the rest of the world and you go off in a closet and you play video games with somebody in Bangladesh somewhere, social media, cell phones. I can remember if somebody called

during supper, you answered and said, I'm eating supper right now. I have to call you back. Click. Now, I can't tell you how many times I watch families sitting at dinner table where all four people eating dinner are texting. Yes while at dinner together So you've got social media. You've got all of that. I do I do hear you and I do think the vitriol involved in our politics and the media supporting one side of the politics or another, i.e. CNN, CNBC versus Fox

and Newsmax also scare us, frighten us and pull us into our tribes. And I think about all of this, and you talk about the last two decades, the last two generations, the last two generations, and it all just makes enormous sense that all of the money and success and everything this country's had

and its evolution into kind of how we interact with each, even dating, we date online now, which doesn't even create a human interaction. Yes. And then on top of all of that I read what you what you another thing that just shocked me in 2018 49.6% of households made charitable contributions, which is a drop of 17% since 2000. Yes. I mean, the thing is, we become much more self-interested.

Right. It all plays together. When I read that and I hear you, that's it just clicked as I sit here. The word we would use is we are not involved with pro social activities. Therefore we become more anti social. Let's think about it. We don't, we don't give, which leads to less joy, less happiness for me. For me, I mean the, the challenge is the phone or the immediate opportunity to do something

versus developing a relationship or building institutions or building the phone or the immediate opportunity to do something versus developing a relationship or building institutions or building community, this is a pretty attractive alternative for the next five minutes, 10 minutes. But the alternative is much better and we will be happier, but it takes more energy, more time. And that's the challenge. It's the immediate gratification versus something that generally involves a bit

more work, a bit more time. And this is, this is without, this is like only a transaction. Like I'm, I'm doing some transaction. This is very relational. It's, it's, it's a different, I think this is much better, the relational, but it's harder for us to come out of our shells the less and less we do so. This is the real challenge we're facing as a society.

The subtitle of your book, Fragile Neighborhoods, is repairing American society one zip code at a time. So I'm about to just let you roll with this, but there's a there's a preface to it. We may not be a fragile country and, you know, you scoff at the notion that a fragile company is in Nigeria and then even trying to compare America to Nigeria. I mean, you're in two different stratospheres really,

or universes. But I can also tell you that there was a time where people thought that someone buying a Japanese made car of an American made car on our soil was the most ridiculous notion on the face of the planet. That was only 60 years ago. So before we get too high on our soil was the most ridiculous notion on the face of the planet. That was only 60 years ago. So before we get too high in our saddle on our big, tall, high horse in America, we need to realize we are only the disintegration

of our institutions away from being Nigeria if we're not careful. Yes. And so fragile neighborhoods appearing, American society, one zip code at a time to me is a paramount piece of work as it pertains to the work that Alex and I do. We believe, with everything we are, without the data points of a Johns Hopkins professor who has spent his life clearly becoming well-versed in this topic is that it government is is is obviously an

integral part of our lives because we have to have that institutions we have to have that control we have to have all of those things but they are not going to fix what else is the most right now. Rather, it's just going to be an army of normal folks that come together, interact in community and serve one another. That is ultimately what fixes what's broken. And that's what we've been screaming at the top of our lungs for the last 14 months since this thing started, which is why I find your work so fascinating,

because I think all of the data and work and everything you're doing actually agrees with our uninformed premise to start a podcast. So we get the greatly disadvantaged neighborhoods, where they came from and why. We've really covered that. We get the gross disconnectivity, your two sources. And I think we get that and why.

So let's get to the redemption. How do we repair American society once it's coded at a time? How does Seth encourage us to do that? Well I think there's many steps. As a start we need to think that neighborhoods are the building blocks of neighborhoods or the building blocks of successful places, cities, towns, whatever you want to look at it, county, states, country. So we have to go back to the point that neighborhoods is the unit of change. So much that we do as a society is focused on the individual

and not focused on the place and not focused on institutions. We'll be right back. 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 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 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsmen plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in

Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the Weird Little Guys Trying to

Destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys 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 iHeart 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. Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, host of Womanica, a daily podcast that introduces you to the fascinating lives of women history has forgotten. This month, we're bringing you the stories of athletes. There's the Italian race car driver who courted danger

and became the first woman to compete in Formula One. The sprinter who set a world record and protested racism and discrimination in the U.S. and around the world in the 1960s. The diver who was barred from swimming clubs due to her race and went on to become the first Asian American woman to win an Olympic medal. She won gold twice.

The mountaineer known in the Chinese press as the tallest woman in the world. And the ancient Greek charioteer who exploited a loophole to become the first ever woman to compete at the Olympic Games. Listen to Wamanica on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We need to think in terms of neighborhoods. So that's the first thing. That's again, that's the whole point of my book. And so we can build a country of strong neighborhood communities, but of course we need to think in terms of neighborhoods. That's the first thing. The second thing is I

would be measuring everything that we want to do around the neighborhoods. So if you were to go to like, if we're in Memphis right now, I guarantee you if you were to evaluate how well the city was doing by its neighborhoods, you would find some neighborhoods doing quite well, some doing not so well, and some doing pretty badly. And so that would immediately give you a different lens as opposed to thinking about individuals. So I would talk about that.

And in terms of what you would be doing, again, there's great variation and every place is different. Every neighborhood is different. Every city is different. But I believe we need to think of neighborhood centered, neighborhood centered. So neighborhood centered and every neighborhood needs to have strong institutions to thrive. So the more government is neighborhood centric, the more nonprofits are neighborhood centric. And then we go through, you and I spoke before about the importance of neighborhood schools. But so if we were to go and look at all of Memphis, we would say there's a lot of neighborhoods that need help and we're not going to do all these neighborhoods.

We would have a strategy to neighborhoods that need help, and we're not going to be doing all these neighborhoods. We would have a strategy to prioritize a few. One would be the geography. It's got to be relatively close to some place dynamic. It's got to have some assets that we can build on. It's probably got to have people who are that have the right people that might want to work with you that you can do something. And there to work with you, that you can do something. And there's a few others, but you know, something about people, it's something about assets, it's something about physical location.

It's much harder to do an outline neighborhood far removed than it is to the neighbor that looks like it could be strongly connected, just as an example. So you're gonna prioritize neighborhoods, then you're going to think about what does it mean to strengthen this neighborhood. And so we could go through, so there's a material aspect, but there's also this role of institutions and connecting. If every neighborhood had places for us to gather, if every neighborhood had community schools. If for example, libraries,

I've talked a bit about libraries, not today, libraries were developed for a time of knowledge scarcity in an era of relationship richness. What would happen if they were rethought for a time of knowledge? We have a lot of knowledge, but now we're in a time of relationship scarcity. So I mean, I could rethink libraries

so they played a role in neighborhoods. I can rethink schools. I can rethink in terms of economics. Can we ensure that every neighborhood has small businesses? So I basically want even churches. Churches used to be very, very neighborhood based. Today churches tend to be divorced from neighborhoods. You often have these mega churches

and they deliver lots of things for people. Do they build community? Do they build place community? So I would be going through society, parts of government, parts of philanthropy, parts of all these different institutions, and I'd be asking what can we do to ensure that every neighborhood, that we create a neighborhood-centered society? Part of that is, if people are living in this place, we need local leaders. How do we develop

local leaders? How do we develop platforms to bring together local institutions? How do we ensure that people in this neighborhood have access to the institutions they need? But also how do they have the leaders who will be the models and the mentors? So we need to bond, we need to bridge, we need to make every place institutionally rich. Institutionally rich means socially rich. And so I've just jotted down lots of bullets here.

And again, you gotta think of what is the strategy for the city or the region, and then you gotta go through and think is, what is the strategy for the places we wanna prioritize? And you gotta think this is not a fast, this is not a fast moving thing. There's some things we could do relatively fast, like make sure every place had

a coffee shop, every place had some institutions where people would gather. But mostly you're talking about incrementally doing things to encourage neighbors to work together. It could be small grants program for neighbors, things they're doing to encourage institutions to be more vested in their neighborhood, things that would attract talent. The neighborhood is very, very poor. It's going to need to become more mixed income. So you're going to have to attract talent into the neighborhood. So you need to think about people.

You need to think of institutions. You need to think of an attraction for this neighborhood. And I've just listed a whole bunch of things and we could keep going on and on. I think on a bigger picture, we want to encourage people to invest, not in the national politics and national campaigns to drive us apart. What would happen if we all invested our energy in the place we live? And what would, what would happen if we, invested our energy in the place we live? And what would happen if we, and we have to build institutions.

We have a decay of these local institutions. We need to rebuild our local institutions. Part of that is we need to provide incentives and opportunity. Part of it is we ourselves, we need to be stewards of place. We don't use this word stewardship a lot. I'm a big believer that we need to be stewards of place. We don't use this word stewardship a lot. I'm a big believer that we need to be stewardship of our place in a way.

So it's also a cultural change. It's a messaging change. I've given you some practical things we could go deeper into. What is the Department of Housing for Memphis? How would they act differently? How does the library act differently? How does the church act? Each of these have a role to play.

How could businesses contribute? All of these, in each sector, we could rethink what we do such that they would strengthen the local, encourage people to join institutions, make our society much more neighborhood centric. You know, it used to be because of the nature of transportation and nature of life, the geography constrained us. And we built community without even thinking about it.

Today, the technology liberates us. And we are relationship poor as a result. We have all this knowledge and these distant networks. We have to be so much more intentional. We have to be intentional as a person. We have to be intentional as a leader of an institution. We have to be intentional as a society to make our lives and our physical and institutional landscape much more neighborhood-centric. And that means that each actor in the society has a role to play, and we ourselves have a role to play. I mean, if I give money, I mostly give it to local organizations, give things away. I'm on

the board of a local nonprofit, a special needs school that's mostly for kids in my neighborhood. I contribute strongly to one other institution. I go to the dinner for this. And you know, there's a lot of little things we can do to help out, but if we ourselves don't make this choice, and especially if you lead an institution or you have a role in government,

how do you rethink what you do to ensure that all the neighborhoods around you, especially your own neighborhood, how do they thrive? If that was our metric for success, boy, would we think differently about so many things. One of the things we say that I say often is amazing things happen when your passion and your discipline meet at opportunity and you don't have to be part of some massive NGO or massive 501 C3 to exact some small measure of change in your community. Exactly. Where it works for you. You can reach out. I mean it helps if you know a person or two and you team up sometimes with people. it's not easy to say, I myself, I'm going to do something. But there's, you know, we should, we should stop thinking

that we need, we don't need to, to bring, I mean, it would be great if we could create this enormous change. But actually, most change happens step by step by step. So we think what could we do if we're just thinking in terms of personal, could I do a block party? Could I reach out find two or three people and we do some volunteer activity? I have a neighbor, I live at a very short street, it's two blocks. I'm at 910 the end of the block. I have this woman at 903, she doesn't even know I talk about her, but she's this amazing person. Must be about 60 years old, and in the late 50s. Really nice person, but doesn't talk a lot. She pretty much seems like an introvert, takes a lot of walks. But I see her because I'm on her

block. And I'm aware, her mother lives a couple blocks away, and her mother lives alone. Her father passed away, and they live in the same neighborhood. And I'm aware, I think it's because of her mother, that she goes around and visits all the people in the neighborhood who live alone. I see her knocking because I have a neighbor and I have a neighbor on the other side who lives alone, must be in her 80s. And I see this woman going, knocking on that door,

going in and talking, and I see her walking up and down the streets. That's one thing she does. I know if we have a park cleanup and it comes in, I get an email, we have a park cleanup, whose email is at the bottom? It's her name. I know if we have some volunteer to like give clothes or to go and visit a nonprofit to volunteer and help them out, whose name is there? It's her name. So she's doing all these little things. You would never know she was doing this

unless you paid attention. And she doesn't receive any, I don't think anyone appreciates it. She maybe she doesn't need the appreciation actually. She's a very modest woman. She's never won an award, never had a title, doesn't run an organization. Yet there's at least four different things

that I'm aware she's doing. And I probably don't even know half the things she's doing. So it's just amazing. I remember one day I walked by her house and she had loads and loads of bags, like literally a hundred bags of used clothes on her front yard. I mean, that's a lot of bags of clothes on the front.

They were like all over the place. This looks really odd. What is going on here? So I had to go and ask. She was gathering used clothes to give to some charity or something. And so she's a force upon herself and nobody asked her. And as far as I can tell, she does it all alone.

And? Just think about that. And you just got through bragging about your community. And the first example of a person in this awesome community that you live in is this woman. This is woman. But what's so magical when you're in a community is there are people you just I mean, when you live in a community and there's and it becomes the norm that you just step up and do something.

It's amazing how many people who you would never envision were leaders. I have a friend. I can't even call him a friend. I know him. I see him enough. And he lives like two houses down or whatever on this street. I mean, again, it's not unusual in my neighborhood that we have lots of, I mean, he lives there. I know his brother moved in. I know his wife has this, you know, there's like four or five houses sort of connected because they different parts of the families.

It's so unusual that we have so many multi, I mean, we have across the street, it was part of four generations until his parents died. That's my, but I know this guy, he's a dentist. He's not, he doesn't never, it doesn't seem like a leader to me. I hate to say it. We're not gonna mention any names here.

But then again, I just noticed, in fact I noticed, I don't think of him and his wife as being leaders, they seem like very simple people. I'm aware he put his name up and he co-led a big fundraiser in the last year because I saw his name on it and I couldn't believe it because it was like a big deal to get money for something. And I just, whatever, there was a fundraiser

for another association that I just noticed his wife was co-chairing it. It was whatever, some comedian was coming in to do something and we were all gonna raise some money for some small association. I don't even know if they're registered. The thing is when you live in a neighborhood like this, so many associations,

they're not even registered. They're just there, they just pop up, they do things. And there's all this stuff going on, and these people, you just can't believe that they just become important. They just say, I can play a role, and I'm gonna join with a couple of other neighbors and I'm going to do something and you just see it like hundreds of times. And it's almost like every house somebody is doing something and it's like unbelievable to see and I think this when we think about the Tocqueville.

We think about Bob Robert Putnam the famous political scientists talking about America like in the 50s. famous political scientists talking about America, like in the 50s. This I think is what it was all about. It's an army of normal folks. In fact, they're doing more than they're just, they seem so normal. And yet they're not because they're leaders in their own right in a way that's invisible unless you actually were looking out your window and watching them every day. But Seth, that's what's so fascinating to me is you've been doing this your whole life.

You know what fragile neighborhoods and fragile areas look like from Nigeria to Afghanistan to all the other places you mentioned. You've studied it. You've written a book on it. You've outlined the data points and it all comes down to, let's improve our communities and our neighborhoods by just having normal people interact with one another, build community and serve one.

I think in America, that's true. If I'm in Somalia, we're talking like that, but in this country, I would say it's about normal people stepping up. I would say it's joining with other people in your neighborhood. I would say really important we build institutions and we rethink institutions. Because to develop what you what the big question I asked in my in my in my research is that I was I ran around this country looking for organizations.

And if you read read my book, you know, I profile five that were doing things that were able to scale up the strength of relationships in a place. Oh, tell me five. So I have five. I did one that worked on, just built a neighborhood hub in Detroit. This is life remodeled.

And they basically are, they brought a lot of organizations. You had Darren Babcock here not too long ago. That's sort of what he did. He used his urban farm to bring a lot of institutions into a neighborhood. This is what the person in Detroit did. I have somebody who worked on, a person in Appalachia working on how to basically through the schools to strengthen community, strengthen the prospects of towns and counties. So one is just the building community, one is through the schools, one is I would say inter family. That was someone in Baltimore, organization called Thread, focused on the worst achieving ninth graders. And so it was basically creating a Thread family to support these kids, kids who for the most part

had not had love, had not had stability, had not had the social context to thrive. So at Interfamily, I have one on church and marriage, that's Communio, that's working with churches all across the country, basically within a few miles of their church to strengthen marriage. And then I have one that was actually thinking a little more in terms of the place. How do we work on a neighborhood with a more systemic, that's something called purpose-built communities based in Atlanta. The whole point was in all of these examples,

the big question I was asking is what can we do to strengthen relationships and strengthen the institutions that support them at a neighborhood level? And so when you're talking about normal people, what they can do, I would say by all means believe in yourself, by all means step up, by all means find other people, but if you're gonna funnel your energy, I would say you can surely do things informally starting off. But I would say to the extent that we have neighborhood and place unique institutions, it could be economic, could be religious, it could be social, it could be cultural, could be civic, it could be anything. We want to have institutions that bring people together

and do it over and over and over again and create lots of spinoffs. So we create that cohesion, we create that community, and we make our places better. If we all did that, what a difference it would make. Amen. My Jewish brother, Seth Kaplan, I'm giving you an hallelujah from-

Hallelujah. Yeah. I just, I sit and hear you, and I'm like tapping my foot on the ground. You're like the data point. You are the human data point, the human human research data point that says exactly what I believe and it's I'm how do we join so in how do we join to create this bigger

movement so I'm I'm you have an open offer tell me what we can do to help more people more places step into this and figure out not only that they want to do this, but how they can do it. Open invitations. Anyone listening, watching, find me. I'm happy to be helpful. We want to step into this and help as many people as possible and create a movement of people doing this. So you need to come up. Maybe it's at a later date. How do we make this more possible for more people? We'll be right back.

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 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 iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsmen plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in

Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the Weird Little Guys Trying to Destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys 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 iHeart True Crime Plus channel today, available exclusively on Apple podcasts. Hello, from Wonder Media Network, I'm Jenny Kaplan, host of Womanica, a daily podcast that introduces you to the fascinating lives of women history has forgotten. This month we're bringing you the stories of athletes. There's the Italian race car driver who courted danger and became the first woman to compete in Formula One. The sprinter who set a world record and protested racism and discrimination in the U.S. and around the world in the 1960s.

The diver who was barred from swimming clubs due to her race and went on to become the first Asian-American woman to win an Olympic medal. She won gold twice. The mountaineer known in the Chinese press as the tallest woman in the world. And the ancient Greek charioteer who exploited a loophole to become the first ever woman

to compete at the Olympic Games. Listen to Wamanica on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your first example of five, the life remodeled thing, that's a Chicago thing, right? That's Detroit. Life remodeled thing. That's a Chicago thing, right? That's Detroit. Life remodeled Detroit. Excuse me. Life remodeled Detroit. Interestingly, Detroit at one time, I think,

was the most wealthy per capita city in our country back at one point. Yes, you're going back a long time. It was also, I remember Detroit almost reached 2 million. Now it's about 600 hundred and maybe fifty thousand. Unbelievable. It's incredible. If you drive around Detroit, it's like a post-war situation.

I can talk a little bit about that. Detroit used to be very wealthy. Detroit used to be very incredible neighborhoods. And it was, the population is down about 60 percent. And driving through Detroit, it's like a post-war situation. Literally you have whole neighborhoods that are in decay or the houses have been removed. You can go to churches, you can go to schools,

you can go to these glorious buildings, huge factories. They're still there, but they've collapsed upon themselves, shattered glass, cement. I mean, I literally have seen schools and churches. You just can't believe it's almost like they were bombed. It's incredible to see, actually. So explain what life remodeled is doing about this. So and why and why you focused on them in the book?

I mean, obviously, you believe significantly what they're doing. So what are they doing? And why is that such a great example? So first I have five examples and the five are not chosen out of thin air. I looked at the data and it's there if you look closely on it again, it's not written in a very data manner but I list at some point, what are the factors

for the success of the neighborhood? And there's plenty of data about what correlates with success. And so the five examples I chose were five of the most important. And so one of them is the communal aspect, the term that people would use in research is collective efficacy, the collective, the people working together to make a place better. What's the, it's something that's hard to measure, but so I look, I was looking for someone who was doing this.

I found Life Remodeled, somebody I knew recommended the organization. And what's Life Remodeled is so interesting is first started by a pastor, a pastor who originally wanted to take his church out of the building to help people, and then found his real destiny was actually helping the people. And so he doesn't run a church, at least that I'm aware of currently. And he started just by trying to fix up some houses.

And then it evolved to try to fix some streets and then some neighborhoods. And that evolved to, he got to the point where he had 10,000 volunteers on what he called the, some something called the six day, six days of volunteer work, removing blight, beautifying neighborhoods and repairing roofs and boilers. Did this once a year? He did it once a year, six days. Six days of 10,000 volunteers. 10,000 volunteers and organizations.

It was an intense six day experience. And he still does this, he still does it. And this got him the chance to know lots of people in Detroit. And he was doing this work for several years. Slowly he became known, he slowly got requests. So the school system asked him if he could do, they were renovating, could they do something, they were thinking what can we do to go past

the six days. We have the rest of the year, we have our contacts. So he started doing some renovation work on some schools and renovating some neighborhood assets like playgrounds and stuff like this. And then it became, it got to the point where they were thinking, what could we do that's even more ambitious than that? And the city government, they were talking to a particular school about something. And then the city government, the education, actually, I say the education authorities of Detroit came back to him and says, actually, what we would like you to do is not what you're asking us.

We would like you to take over this whole middle school and instead of beautiful Gothic 1920s middle school, because our school system is shrinking because of the problems of the population. And we're gonna take the middle school and put it in the high school. And we're gonna have this huge building and we can in the high school. And we're gonna have this huge building and we can't afford it.

Literally they don't have the money to support these buildings. And we're looking for someone to take it over and maybe create a hub. And so this is like a great opportunity. The building is incredible. And like schools used to be, these schools, there used to be a primary school,

this middle school and high school, the primary school no longer is there, but it's the center of the whole neighborhood. Literally, this is how the city was built. Very neighborhood. So many cities were built. Yes, because the schools were neighborhood schools and they were like the center of life in the neighborhoods.

So he took over, he got a chance to take this over. They gave him an incredibly good deal, a 50 year lease, $1. And he had worked in this neighborhood. He knew the leaders in this neighborhood. And he assumed, because he was coming in with the chance to invest money and build up this as a hub, that people in the neighborhood would be thrilled because he had been doing stuff, removing blight, beautifying, repairing homes. But this was a hard experience. So what I've tried to do in all my examples and my whole book, this is a book,

yes, I spent part of the book telling us what is wrong, but 70% of what I try to do, I mean, I spent, I have the focus on neighborhoods, which is very unique. And I spent 70% of what I'm trying to do in this work is show people what they can do. So I'm into I don't my day job, I don't get paid for talking, I get paid for solutions. So this book is all about solution. So I just looking deeply, we had to learn what his problems were. So he had this big challenge that he announced. He got this great lease from the government to convert this building that would have been abandoned or who knows who could take it over because it literally took millions of dollars. He had to fundraise. He thought the neighborhood, the community would be thrilled.

And he got basically, he got a reality check. They were mistrustful. They were angry. They called him out. And we need to think a little bit about this. Here is a white guy. Wasn't from the area and he was living in the suburbs. This was a black neighborhood.

There's been a long history of racial tensions in Detroit. There continues to be some tensions in Detroit. This is a city with basically a lot of the problems are, I can't say all the problems, but a lot of problems is because white people left the city and the city became much poorer and investment left the city. And so there's a long history and a lot of things that I as the outsider couldn't quite understand

all the depths of it, but I could understand really easy. Black residents don't like this white outsider coming in. They're thinking he's taking over this most beautiful building in our neighborhood. Maybe they're gonna take over the whole neighborhood and we're gonna be kicked out or something like that. So he basically had a reality check that he had to step back and ask, what was he doing wrong?

Because he had a good intentions, nice guy. I don't think he had any bad intentions, but he didn't fully understand the people, the place. And he had a guy working for him, a guy named Duan, the guy in charge, Chris Lambert, this guy named Duan, who I met when I was in Detroit, really smart guy. Duan was from, not that neighborhood, but from a similar neighborhood in the city. He knew exactly what was in Detroit, really smart guy. Dwan was from, not that neighborhood, but from a similar neighborhood in the city.

He knew exactly what was going on. And he coached, literally coached Chris and say, Chris, you need to spend time just listening. You need to, there's not gonna be a solution. We often think, what is the solution? First, we have to spend time listening. Then we have to think about what do we do to get people to know us, to trust us?

And he learned, this is like on the job training, literally you have to learn it. Go street by street, break bread with people, show up over and over again, look for the local leaders. Basically look for people who you might call gatekeepers. These are people who are long standing residents, a neighbor like this has got a lot of turnover, but there are people who are older

who don't leave the neighborhood. They've been there for a long time. And he basically identified leaders. He brought them in. He eventually created an advisory group with a lot of authority of local leaders, create a second advisory group of kids, students, because a lot of what they do is for students.

And he basically had to learn. He also changed who was working in his organization. His organization was, to be honest, too white and too outsider, and he hired more local people. And so he changed who was working there. He changed basically how he approached people. He changed how he listened. And he goes step by step by step. And I think the big lesson from this and the big lesson and then I'll get to the end point,

the big lesson which is from this whole process, at first it's many steps, it's very personal, it's very small group, food helps, building trust with the right people because they have a larger impact. But in the end, it's not what we're doing and it's not how we're doing it. The first thing is the who. We have to think about the who and then we think about the when.

And only then do we think about the what and how. It tends to be when we wanna do things, we immediately think about what are we doing and how we're gonna do it. But that's now where we should start. We should start with who are the people involved. We have to spend time with the who and then we have to gradually learn when is the right time to start talking about the what. And only then when we get to the what we begin to think about the how and the what and the how is being informed by the who and the when so they ended up with three priorities that became the what and

The how they learned very well about leaning into the community working with the community the 39 different organizations that are in this building today They are according to the priorities and they're not just invited in, it's insistent that they have relationships with each other, they have relationships with neighbors, there's a lot of effort into the relational work. And so again, the who and the when. Do you mean they built a community, ironically enough?

And the incredible thing is now I have data to prove it. I wrote this and I published my stuff and I felt he was a great example. And I thought everything he was doing about building what we call again, the collective efficacy, the social capital, the social cohesion. It was inherent to his approach and what he had learned and what he was doing. And now afterwards, only in the last few months, I have two data points. So there's a local survey, Detroit is some Gallup, which does this big surveying company,

there's all these national surveys. In Detroit, they uniquely have been doing neighborhood surveys about how people look at different issues. And one of their questions on, do you feel your neighborhood is flourishing? And here out of the blue, this pretty poor neighborhood in the recent ranking became number two in the city and how residents view their neighborhood is flourishing. So that was one data point that this in the second data point is phenomenal.

That's phenomenal because it's again, it's the self-perception of the neighborhood has been transformed and it basically means people are their attitude towards each other place and institutions have changed. And the second data point is this place used to be top 10 in crime. And now it's near the bottom in crime. So actually the safety of the place has changed because the people's attitude towards each other and the place has changed because the people's attitude towards each other and the place has changed.

And so there's two data points that I didn't actually know when I leaned into the story. I leaned into the story because of the person and what we can learn from him and what we can learn from all the people involved. But this is where we actually see results. It's incredible that he has those results. And it's incredible that those results happened as a result of building community, investing in the neighborhood and, and employing all of the normal people from around that area to be part of the answer. It is a microcosm of what we're saying.

They make, the thing is, he learned, first of all, they brought a lot of institutions in, so some of them are economic, some of them are local businesses, some of them are like health or things for kids, different things, but they did all these things to the place from institutional desert to institutional abundance,

they brought in lots of local people to play a role and they have this ongoing relationship. So it literally changes everything and the local people's attitude towards everything is different. We could do the same everywhere. That's the key point. We'll be right back. everywhere. That's the key point. We'll be right back.

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 gridiron, and the 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. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters.

But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat.

It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the Weird Little Guys Trying to Destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Weird Little Guys 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 iHeart 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. 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. 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. What did Chris learn about building trust? So when Chris original goal was bringing people together, that's his original vision before he figured out all these details. And when he started, he thought that that would be something about dialogue. But what he learned over time was you don't build trust encouraging people to talk with each other, you build trust by having people do things with each other.

And so literally when he has this volunteer, a six day volunteer activity with 10,000 people, or he has this practical work in this particular neighborhood I talked about, when people roll up their sleeves people or he has his practical work in this particular neighborhood I talked about. When people roll up their sleeves and they work together to beautify a place, to work with people from a different neighborhood, from a different part of the city, and they spend hours with each other, they're talking not about anything important. A lot of it's small talk, but if you're working together on

the street, on the house, on planting bushes, whatever it might be, planting flowers, or whatever working to help individuals, and you did it for hours upon hours, you're building a relationship. You're gradually getting deeper and deeper, and you haven't actually brought up anything that would be quote unquote a dialogue. But you've built a relationship from the work, you don't build a relationship from the dialogue. And I think this is a mistake of people who try to say,

how do we depolarize our country? We need to get people who disagree to come together. I totally disagree. We need to get people in their place to come together, the work on making the place better and the trust and everything that goes with it will be a result of the work. It won't be the goal of the work.

It will be an outcome of the work. It becomes, it won't be the goal of the work. It will be an outcome of the work. It becomes, it is phenomenal. Because this is more practical experience, but it is phenomenal how conversations about race and creed and religion and all that other stuff are so easy and civil and unthreatening when you have them with people that you have a foundation of respect for

because of what you've done together. You can have those conversations. You can have dialogue about differences when there's a foundation of respect and trust between the two people having that conversation. And what you're saying is you build that foundation and trust to then have that dialogue based on interacting with one another,

doing stuff together. I would say if you ask our biggest problem as a country, we've weakened that foundation tremendously. We used to have this foundation that neighborhood by neighborhood existed and the foundation is gone or in deep, deep decay. And we need to rebuild that foundation simply by doing things together place by place.

And it also creates, I would have to say on a larger scale, not only is it with each other, it creates a different relationship between us and broader society. Today, so much about what happens politically, economically, everything, it's being done to us and we feel kind of disempowered, passive, alienated, frustrated.

If we were actually to do things locally, we begin to have a real stake in society and we begin to have agency and we begin to feel we begin to have a real stake in society, and we begin to have agency, and we begin to feel we actually can make a difference, and our attitude towards everything else changes as well. I think it works on two levels, with each other and with broader society as well. So you're saying a strong foundation matters, and if it's fragile?

Fragile foundation leads to a fragile society. That's what I'm saying. Yes, totally agree. When we're talking about the health of neighborhoods for the health of our country, it's interesting that the actual health of the people in those neighborhoods differ so significantly. And I can't remember where I read it.

It may have been Detroit, but or somewhere where you said that the life expectancy of one group of people was like in the 60s and the other was almost in the 90s, but they're only five miles from each other. What? Explain that. Yeah. So lifespan is a crude barometer of how well a place is doing. I mean, there's other things we can look at. And I said earlier, that one way you can see that American society is not healthy is that fact that our average lifespan has diverged significantly from similar similarly rich countries. Yeah, many, many of the developed countries are going

up. Yes, there's been a divergence gradually for 40 years. We've plateaued, right? We've plateaued. I mean, let's put COVID aside, but COVID was actually worse here than most of these other countries. So you have this chart where you can see this divergence. But if you look in America,

what's so stark is the difference in lifespan based upon where you live. Between the worst and the best place, it can be 40 years. I think a more typical difference is 20 years. A more typical difference is probably in a city like Memphis. I know it's true in Washington DC. I know it's true. I was speaking to some people recently, they were in the health care profession, they were talking about the suburbs of Kansas City. And I think in most, most parts of America, you can find a 20, 25 year gap in lifespan just a couple of miles apart. I live here, it's gonna be 85 or even higher.

I live here, it's gonna be in the mid 60s. And if you are born in these places, not only do you have enormous differences in terms of your immediate surroundings, you have enormous differences in your whole life prospects, including your lifespan. Again, all about community. It's all about community. It's all about place.

It's all about communities and it's health and other things. So a good example of this is there was a great study about two neighborhoods, North and South Lawndale in Chicago. They were equally poor. And in 1995, there was this incredible heat wave, three days. And if you look at some well-known academic

went and looked at a study of these two neighborhoods, actually looked across the city, but what stood out was these two neighborhoods. They were both, they were equally poor. One neighborhood, very few people died. Another neighborhood, a lot of people died. I don't know the numbers, but let's say over a hundred people died

and here maybe a few people died. And the big difference, he did what he called the social autopsy. Basically- He did a social autopsy. That's the term he he called the social autopsy. He did a social autopsy. That's the term he used, the social autopsy. He did an autopsy of the society, the neighborhood, very few people dying.

It's like a little society, had lots of connection, had lots of like small businesses, local associations. Even though it was not a wealthy community, it was poor. It was connected. Social and material poverty are not the same thing. You can be in a place that you have both and you can be in a place that's economically poor and socially rich, and you can be in a place

that's economically rich and socially poor. And I bet if our listeners would look at their lives and look at the places around them, I bet they could find examples of both. So the place that was disconnected had six times as many deaths as the place that was equally poor but socially well connected. And we're talking three miles apart, same heat wave.

Same heat wave, same income level, more or less, and six times more deaths in one neighborhood than another. It's simply the one neighborhood had very strong community and one neighborhood was very, very much people were, were isolated, disconnected from each other. And I'll give just briefly another example, because to do these examples, you need similar places and you need what's called a natural experiment,

like a heat wave. Another example, if you looked at like Japan during the tsunami, this hit like the northeast part of Japan. So somebody else looked at that, looked at all the towns on the coast, and he could show from his results the towns that were more socially disconnected. People went back and informed everybody and they got out the towns that had the most deaths. And tragically, in one of these towns, it was actually a school, which the kids were not, were not told to leave the school.

The towns that had the most social disconnection had many more deaths. So this is something that you can see over and over again during a, during like a crisis, but I think you could see it during COVID, neighborhoods that had strong connection, people came together, they didn't stand up, people were more isolated from each other. And just imagine that day in and day out and how that affects people's lives. It is fascinating. We'll be right back.

We'll be right back. 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 gridiron, and the 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, 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. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from

the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat. It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys 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 iHeart 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. Smokey the Bear'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. What you decide, don't play with matches, don't play with fire.

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Brought to you by the USDA Forest Service, your state forester and the Ad Council. It's interesting. I've been taking lots of notes. Neighborhoods are the building blocks. Places are units of change. Measure the neighborhoods and their success. Create neighborhood centers. School, rethink.

Neighborhood centered thinking for all of our institutions. Right. For schools, reimagined libraries, houses of worship, small businesses. Small businesses. Right. You need strong institutions. You need the role of connectivity, local leader development, local leadership development, which is brilliant. And you need neighborhoods to be attractive and you need institutional richness where you're investing locally and you have stewardship of your place, where you live,

have stewardship of the needs there. And as we talk about re-imagining or building these institutions, the question then is who does that? Well, it's the same answer. Normal folks who want to invest in that neighborhood and their corner of the world. But if we had an army, millions of people investing in and doing this very thing and their zip code, think of what country looks like in 20 years. I mean, that to me is what we want to work.

We want to encourage people to do that. I mean, if you, the, the thing that is so magical when you live in one of these neighborhoods and when enough of it is happening, there's like a tipping point. And it's just amazing how many people are just doing something. And it's just, it's unreal. I mean, we have so many institutions. We have so many, again, people that you would not think are leaders, they step up and be leaders.

It's something in the water we're drinking. It's in the culture. And the thing is, if you're in a place that's not like that, you have to do enough of it so it becomes like that. That's the real question that we all have to ask ourselves. Well, that's conversely to your neighborhood. Think about these abysmal neighborhoods where nobody's doing anything. Yes,

and then ask yourself, you don't have to ask yourself very long, well, why does it look like this? Well, nobody's investing in their place in their institutions in the people inside it. I mean, it's a vicious cycle. How do we go from vicious to virtuous cycle? And the thing is, so it's gonna need some social and sometimes some financial investment. The thing is you wanna do enough of it

so you reach a tipping point so you create the virtuous cycle. That's the real question that we have to ask ourselves. Where are you working right now? You mean where am I working? I'm not where. I know you got job. Practically I'm looking for cities and institutions to take this work. I'm already starting in Fort Wayne in North, what's that, Northeastern Indiana. Tell me what that looks like. So what we're going to be doing is we're going to be developing. We're going to take both of the issues I raised, place-based inequalities, wrongness, disconnection, and we're going to develop strategy. And we're going to work with government, work with philanthropy,

work with lots of different actors to try to bring in and develop a strategy for the city, for the, to move forward with these ideas. So that will likely mean prioritize a few neighborhoods, do things that will help across neighborhoods, maybe try to work on creating a model neighborhood, something that could be an example to everything else. And I don't think that's quick, but it's something that I be an example to everything else. And I don't think that's quick, but it's something that I'm really happy

to have an opportunity to lean into this. And I think over time, we wanna create models. If you create a couple of places that lean into this work and they show what's possible, we're hopefully gonna create like a cascading impact that a lot of people follow. And a model that others can follow. That's the whole point.

When people see what works. I mean, I've spoken to lots of places. I've been in Louisville. I've been here only a few months ago talking to some of your leaders. I've been in Grand Rapids. I've been in Indianapolis. Particularly this part of the country, the Midwest to South, through Texas, through Northern Florida, a lot of interest in these ideas.

And I've been to about a dozen of these places in the last six months. And so this is the first one that I've made a long-term commitment. And I think over time, our goal is to make a long-term commitment to a couple of places and then create models that others can learn from,

but also see what's possible. And you could scale. We can scale, yes, for sure. So like a community foundation in Fort Wayne reaches out and says, we recognize our problems, we love what we hear about, and then you go work with them to address the places and disconnectivity to focus on neighborhoods inside their community and kind of, I guess almost gremlin it from there, put water on it and let them keep popping up and grow. Well, Fort Wayne is perfect size, 300, 400, 500, 600,000, really good size to do this

work. You go to a really big city. It's like a Chicago. I've been to Chicago, talked to people there. That is your most likely going to work on single neighborhoods. But when you get to a city of three to 600,000 or something around that, you actually can think on the city level. Wow. So you can actually think strategically.000 or something around that. You actually can think on the city level. Wow.

So you can actually think strategically. I didn't realize that. You can think on the city level and you can say we're gonna strategically choose two or three places and then we're gonna, and again, if you look at a map, this is why maps are so important in all my work. Overseas domestic, look at the map,

try to see what's going on in the city, where are their assets, where there's some may possibly be some existing investment, where places located near each other. When you when you do this work, you have to be very strategic in terms of what you prioritize. So a place like 300,000, you can actually be pretty clear, we may we started the couple of these neighborhoods, and ideas are going to be a lot of spillo. We started a couple of these neighborhoods and the idea is there's gonna be a lot of spillovers and a lot of spinoffs.

And the idea is that we actually do enough so that we'll have a cascading effect. That's the real goal. I can speak because I know Atlanta, I mean, I know the people doing this kind of work in Atlanta. Atlanta is the one city where they're really doing something like this on a city-wide level. The mayor has come in, the mayor has got a neighborhood centered approach and they're

working all the way through the problems. And I'm personally watching them very carefully and I'm doing what I'm learning from Dallas and from all these other places I've worked in. And we're going to learn from them and create a combination of these models that we can apply. That is a fantastic question. Ultimately, though, the plan and the data points and the maps and everything else, you still got to have people to pull it off. It's all going to be, I mean, my job is, I, I,

my job is never to replace the people. My job is to facilitate, catalyze, provide some lessons learned. Teach, educate. I will be humble and say that I'm here to share experiences. And the thing is what is best for any particular place? We always have to be careful. This is what I learned in all the countries I work in. These are things that have worked elsewhere. These are ways to do things. And ideally, local leaders should decide what is most suitable for their context. So I never want to go on and say, this is the rule book. This is the way forward.

I want to go in and, hey, these are different ways to do this work. These are different lessons we can learn. What do you think? Because again, there's always going to be politics involved. There's always going to be different players involved. There's going to be obstacles. All of this will be context specific.

I'm going to go in with my toolkit, with my lots of lessons learned, lots of different experiences, and be open for, again, this is how I live my life. We need to be open to where the journey takes us. The fact that I'm even doing this work six, seven years ago, I couldn't have imagined because I was flying around the world.

And when I work on Fort Wayne or I work on other places, we need to be open so that the place itself will dictate to a certain extent what's the pathway forward. It just kind of feels like the two, as long as you stick with your two leading doctrines, we gotta fix places and we got to have connectivity. How we do that in a particular area, depending on the

people and the politics and the things, that's malleable. Connectivity, we need an abundance of institutions, we need to be neighborhood centric, and then in terms of beyond that, there's a lot of ideas, people have to tell me what they think is most useful. That is... And then in terms of beyond that, there's a lot of ideas. People have to tell me what they think is most useful. That is phenomenal. And then I will tell them it's been tried here. That's not, I'm not sure that, I mean,

there's gonna be a dialogue, a feedback. I mean, clearly, but ideally you need, and this is stuff you have to stick with for a period of time. But you definitely have your 40,000 foot guiding principles and then inside that framework, as long as you have an open approach, you listen and you have people willing to invest. Yes.

And those guiding principles of improving places, institutions and connectivity. Then you start repairing neighborhoods one at a time with this army of people wanting to get this connectivity and their places back. And then places change. Yes, places will change. And if you go to places, I already know it because I'm already doing work in here's a city I knew very little about. And you can very easily, if you look, find local people who want to do things. And the big question is how do you leverage that energy? How do you leverage that energy? How do you leverage the desire?

There's certainly people in the city government who want to do things. There's people in the business, philanthropy. So you have people with an interest. And the big question is, how do you combine these? How do you bring them together? How do you lay out ideas? And how do we facilitate a process

so that lots of places and people will benefit from that? I honestly find this both fascinating and incredibly encouraging because we get all the time, I'm so inspired by this story, I'm so inspired by that story, my heart is tugged on, but how, how do I, how do I, and I mean, this is a how on a pretty grand scale that all filters down to normal people doing what they can in their little corner of the world to be part of this big tent of change.

And... It's a framework for the army. It's a framework for the army. I hate to, I hate to, I wanna be modest here, but when you go around looking, this is what my day job is, creating frameworks for social change. If you think about what I do in all the countries,

is that we all talk about wanting to work on many of these issues. And I think there's a lot of great things being done, but the more we work within this framework and the more we think neighborhood centric and just thinking across a map, if you're, especially if you're a leader in a city or you're a leader of some philanthropy or some nonprofit or even business, when you begin to think in terms of this framework, you begin to have an idea where might you funnel your energy.

It's not just to help people. How do we help people in a way that will be self-sustaining, self-replicating and be able to create scale? Again, we're trying to create virtuous cycles of change so that our efforts can go to another place eventually. Effective and efficient. If people, how do people, if I got to believe, I mean, this is so interesting. Um, and I don't know how often you get to interact with a person who spent their entire professional life actually studying and coming to the conclusions that you've come to, to then use those conclusions

to try to better communities. If somebody wants to hear more, learn more, or are interested in maybe having you speak with their community foundation, what's the best way to get in touch with you? They can first, you know my name, you can go to, easiest thing is you go to LinkedIn. So I'm on LinkedIn, pretty active on LinkedIn. Seth Kaplan, S-E-S-E-T-H-K-A-P-L-A-N. Or you can find my web, I have a website,

SethKaplan.org, or you can find my web, I have a website SethCaplan.org or you can just email me my first name S-E-T-H at my whole name S-E-T-H-K-A-P-L-A-N period O-R-G and I'm very grateful for anyone who reaches out and I try my very hardest to help anybody and I'm just thrilled to be useful for people who want to lean into this work. Fabulous, phenomenal and awesome. Seth, I will be thinking about stuff you've said two and three days from now, it is so odd that a dude with a podcast trying to tell stories of normal people doing amazing things to try to generate a larger group of people to do more,

inspired by the stories they hear, bumps into a guy who, from a very scientific standpoint has arrived at the same conclusions that it's gonna take normal people doing little things in their communities, building their neighborhoods, but if we had an army of people doing that, we really can reverse so much of what's happened the last few decades in our country.

And I'm so inspired that that notion is basically an agreement in the work we're doing and you're doing. Well, I'm inspired that you have spent the time and energy to build the podcast and to come up with the ideas. And I certainly believe it's the case. We can't wait for people to come from wherever and to help us. We need to step up and do it ourselves and we can accomplish far more than we think we can if we just make an effort and we find others and we create allies and we create friends, we work together. And so I'm very grateful for the work you're doing

to try and encourage more people to do this. Seth Kaplan, you guys, he's preaching. Don't let ourselves become fragile. He's telling us how, he's telling us what the work looks like. I will be getting the book, Fragile Neighborhoods, Repairing American Society One Sipcoat at a Time. looks like. I will be getting the book, Fragile Neighborhoods, repairing American society

one zip code at a time. And this was not about plugging you to sell extra books, but I think the read will be valuable. And Seth, thanks so much for joining me. No, my great pleasure. I'm very grateful to be here. year. And thank you for joining us this week. Is Seth Kaplan or other guests have inspired you in general or better yet to take action? Please let me know. I'd love to hear about it. You can write me anytime at Bill at normalfolks.us and I swear to you, I'll respond.

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and on social, subscribe to our podcast, rate it and review it. Join the Army at NormalFolks.us. Consider becoming a premium member there. All of these things that will help us grow. An Army of Normal Folks. Thanks to our producer, Ironlight Labs. I'm Bill Courtney.

I will see you next week. Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast, Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a 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.

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Stream live only on Hulu and get tickets to be there at AXS.com. 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 tried to save everybody. Listen to Spiral on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

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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. Smokey the bear. Smokey. Then you know why 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.

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.