Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle
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Rediscovering Connection with Shelley Doyle
#27 - Seth Kaplan - Building Social Wealth in Your Neighborhood
Join us for a compelling episode of Rediscovering Connection with Seth Kaplan, a leading expert on fragile states and Professor of International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
We delve into the art of building resilient neighborhoods through active community involvement and local volunteerism. Seth shares profound insights on the role of embodied relationships and social capital, drawing from his extensive research and personal experiences.
This episode is perfect for anyone considering where they want to put down roots or wondering how to integrate into their community, with practical insights on building your social wealth locally. During our interview, Seth discusses the importance of thinking local vs. national, being intentional about your place, and understanding thick vs. thin societies.
About Seth Kaplan
Seth Kaplan is the author of "Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society One Zip Code at a Time", and a leading expert on fragile states, who consults for international organizations as well as country governments and NGO's.
Find Seth Kaplan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sethkaplan28/
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✨Shelley
About Your Host
Hi, I'm Shelley Doyle, a Social Wealth Strategist and Connection Coach. I empower remote and nomadic founders and leaders who crave deeper connections to activate their social wealth, so they can feel trusted, supported, and truly connected—both online and offline—no matter where they are.
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I tend to find intentionally looking to meet people is not as good as if you're doing something with people. If you have a goal, we're going to work together to help, so-and-so. And then if you spend like I researched and wrote about an organization in Detroit and one of their main activities is six days of volunteer activities to improve neighborhoods If you join that and you spend a day or two volunteering with other people, maybe you will be finding some people there in an environment that's not there to meet people. But because you're working with people closely for the day, you're likely to be relaxed and get to know people. So I would always be looking for things like that. Ideally, you find a few people and then you have partners to work with and ultimately, I believe neighborhoods are key because that is where we start with embodied relationships and the more people you know locally, the more likely you're going to have social wealth.
Speaker 2:Hello and welcome to Rediscovering Connection. I am your host, shelley Doyle, and today's guest is Seth Kaplan, who's a leading expert on fragile states. Who's worked around the world for NGOs and international organizations, but his latest book is really a homecoming, talking about repairing American society one zip code at a time. So this is Fragile Neighborhoods Seth's latest book, and it was a real gift for me to connect with Seth. We spoke a lot about neighborhoods and how we can build our social capital, trust in our locality, and how so few people are actually doing this investing in where they live, and Seth is really a prime case study for his work incredibly intentional about where he chose his family to live for the last 12 years, which is really inspiring for me as someone that's moved quite a lot and is kind of looking for somewhere to put down my roots.
Speaker 2:The reason that Seth came onto my radar was something they had said on LinkedIn about social wealth, and this term just so spoke to me as someone who's been working in the realm of social wellbeing, social health, social capital. The term social wealth I found very evocative and, in contrast to social capital, it feels like social wealth is something that feels quite tangible, like we can actually put a figure on that and see how that can be used, transferred like any other form of wealth. So this is really what I'm digging into even deeper in my master's thesis right now and I'm very thrilled that not only Seth Kaplan but another of my guests, robin Dunbar two of my guests in the last 12 months are actually featured in the literature review of my master's. So a huge, huge honor and privilege to have the opportunity to have these individuals come on to speak to me and share some of their decades of knowledge and wisdom. So I really hope you're going to enjoy this episode. I know that I really did enjoy speaking to Seth. Enjoy.
Speaker 1:First of all, thrilled to be with you, shelley. Thank you so much for your bubbling enthusiasm. It certainly affects me, so I appreciate that so much. And if you want a couple of bullets on who I am, I teach at Johns Hopkins University. I work in a lot of fragile countries, conflict-prone countries, and I have a book last year on the fragility of American society which I think works. The message works well for any country like the UK, australia, canada and so on and so forth Similar challenges that we all face in this atomized world that we live in.
Speaker 2:And many of these countries are going through big elections, big changes. The UK has just gone over to labor, canada and the US have elections looming. So how is all of this going to be affecting the fragility of the states that we are living in?
Speaker 1:I think I try not to think too much about politics. I have I don't put political signs on my front yard. I don't have political signs on my car. If people talk politics I will take an interest, but I mostly think in these developed, stable countries, compared to where I usually work, like in Nigeria or Libya or someplace like that, it's not the politics. The politics can affect how we feel, but I don't think it should. I think we should focus first and foremost on things that we can change and we can have the biggest impact on what is around us. So if you ask me how they will affect us, it will probably make some people happy when their choice wins and they'll make other people unhappy. But I think we should not vest too much in politics that are far from us and we should look close to home and think what can we do close to home? That is where we can have a big impact. It's hard to have a big impact when you're talking tens of millions of people.
Speaker 2:I went to a TEDx TEDx Victoria recently and one of the speakers was really just talking about micro villages and how this is the missing piece and how, for some reason, like new developments were just built and that all it is is homes and there was no third spaces planned into them, which has really kept everybody quite isolated and siloed and actually really reimagining the village. I'd love to explore this topic with you.
Speaker 1:I'd be delighted to. I think the way I would think about it is that we all used to live in something like villages. We all used to live in place-based communities with lots of places to meet, lots of institutions. We shopped locally, we prayed locally, we went to school locally. Whatever government or politics was mostly involved was the local.
Speaker 1:And now these things have been removed further from us and we've built a landscape in which we are just in our home. And now, with technology, we're not only in our home, we're in our room alone. And I would say the word that I would like to use is re-village. We want to re-village and I didn't invent that, someone named Mack McCarter who works great on community building in Shreveport Louisiana, that's his expression. We want to re-villagize our landscapes so that we know our neighbors, so that we have local institutions, that we have local places to meet, and the more we are interacting with each other in place or around our places and the more those opportunities present themselves or we create those opportunities, the richer our social lives will be. I think the more trust we will have with each other and actually the better we will be able to solve our problems, because so many of our problems are not problems of government or problems of policy. They're actually problems of breakdown of our relationships.
Speaker 2:Yes, and something that's coming up for me is the word fear.
Speaker 1:Fear.
Speaker 2:yes, Thinking that the streets aren't safe anymore, and the reality is where people are living in so much fear that we're not giving ourselves and our children the freedom that we all need to thrive.
Speaker 1:So I would say we are anxious in a way that it's we're anxious because we don't know our neighbors. We're anxious because we are. We don't have the social support network we used to have. So in my neighborhood, when I walk down the street, I feel a sense of joy. I do not feel a sense of anxiety. I mean, of course, if you look at any data on crime, crime is way down over many, many decades. But I feel a sense of joy because I know who's behind the houses. I know if I'm walking around and I see someone, they're not likely my friend but they're likely a relationship because I've seen their face regularly. I know, if I'm walking around and I see someone, they're not likely my friend but they're likely a relationship because I've seen their face regularly. I know them. I probably know how many kids they have or I know what's going on a little bit with their family or something like that. The point is, when you have lots of relationships and also you have lots of experiences. Let me share an experience with you.
Speaker 1:I can recall many years ago my oldest daughter took her younger brother, who was about a year and a half, out of the car and she dropped him within a few steps, on the cement in front of her house. So imagine I'm there with my wife looking at my year and a half old son and he had a bloody chin, and you're like a frantic parent. I'm like what is happening? My wife runs, picks up the kid and runs down the street. It didn't tell me where she was going. I mean, I'm like what is going on? But she's great in an emergency. What did she do? She comes back a half an hour later and he's bandaged. She went to the closest nurse.
Speaker 1:Because it's not a friend of ours, it's simply a relationship. If you live in a place with the term that I use would be social wealth that you know lots of people, you have relationships with each other, you know each other, you don't feel anxious, you're able to let your kids wander, You're able to go and find help when you need help, and I could give you a hundred stories of I needed help, somebody needed help, somebody was there for somebody else, and how many of us can say that? And that's not just friends. We all try to make friends, but I think the more important factor is relationships.
Speaker 1:Yes, good that we have some close friends and I have a couple of people I would call friends in my neighborhood, but I know hundreds of people and we have norms of supporting each other and we talk to each other when they get to a certain age. And that's a great contrast because most people they have no one to go to who's near them, they're afraid to let their kids out, they're safeguarding themselves. Day to day, your whole mindset changes. Your feeling of joy and happiness is not there because you feel alone and at risk.
Speaker 2:So there's a couple of points I'd love to touch on there. I guess one of them is how have you built such strong ties in your neighborhood? And the other one is about the freedom that we are allowing our children in the real world versus the virtual world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so why don't I do that in reverse order? So I think I just published something on this and I think we look at the. Jonathan Haidt in his book talks about how we've moved from the play-based childhood to the phone-based childhood and about all the downsides. So the problem is, most of his work is he's literally trying to get people to not allow kids to especially not use social media. It's not the phones alone. I mean, you can have a phone that's like a dumb phone and you could talk to your family or talk to your neighbors, but it's the smartphones and social media that the data says is the worst for the kids, because that puts them into a completely different mindset. I mean, they're not present. They have all these social pressures and bullying and feeling bad about themselves because of the social media, not because they're on the internet looking for information, for some research or they're doing at school or something. So there's a positive side but there's a negative side. But all of his work is focused on let's stop access to the phone, and my argument is you can't just focus on the bad. You got to focus on the good, and so he does say we have to go out and play on the good. And so he does say we have to go out and play. But if you're a family and you don't know your neighbors and you don't have relationships, it's not so simple to say go out and play, who are they playing with? And you don't feel so trusting of your neighbors and you don't have any places for them obviously to go to. So I think the bigger argument is the ability to switch from phone to play means that we have to have a community around us, and it's the decay of our communities that put the kids on the screens in the first place and they made them vulnerable to the rise of social media and smartphones. And so we need to think of that as like a three-part story, three-chapter story, and so we need to go upstream and work on the community.
Speaker 1:And so why my neighborhood is special? Because there's various things that make my neighborhood special. First, we have an abundance of place, unique institutions, so we have local stores, we have local civic institutions, we have local religious institutions, we have local businesses, and also we are physically surrounded on three sides by green, so we are a very natural neighborhood. We have a center with stores, and again, we have all these institutions. We have parks. So a neighborhood is typically stronger if it's physically designed as a neighborhood and it has lots of place, specific institutions in the neighborhood.
Speaker 1:So it's not like I mean, yes, I use, I buy virtually, but I go to restaurants locally, I go to the supermarket locally and I know my neighbors. We have community schools. One of the things that's really talked about is the importance of neighborhood schools. If your kids go to a school and their neighbors go to a school, it's like the parents and the kids know their peers and they visit their homes. If everyone is busing to a school, that's not going to happen or you're going to a school far away from home. So I would say we have all these institutions and we have a natural environment and therefore we have much more of a play based childhood than most other kids are having at this point in time.
Speaker 2:And having been doing this work, were you then quite intentional about the neighborhood that you chose to? Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 1:So if you think about my life, so my life it's, I think, the big journey. If I may give you the big journey, I had a lot of trouble as a as a kid, with my peers. I mean, I did fine till sixth grade and then you got into middle school and you go to a larger school and we had a lot of bullying. And we had a lot of bullying and I was always good with class but I was slow on learning all the norms and how to behave, and so I literally had an awful experience in seventh grade, so much that we switched to a different public school in eighth grade, went to the neighboring town's public school, and so I had years seventh, eighth, ninth, into 10th grade in which I was bullied and I was left out and I felt clearly I didn't feel good about myself. But that experience forced me to watch people, watch how people treat each other, watch how people were socialized or the norms or how people behaved, and something about that experience stayed with me. So when I left college, a little bit like you, shelley, I wandered, I basically backpacked. I lived in Africa, I lived in Asia, I lived in the Middle East, I just wandered to, like dozens of countries and at some point I said we need to be practical. So I started working on the question that bothered me the most why do some states work and some don't? I mean, that's a very big question and there's lots of things you can read on it, but very few people focused on the nature of relationships and I was asking myself why does Nigeria not work for the most part, and Japan, where I also live, work so well? Well, one is cohesive, one has very strong social ties, very strong sense of common identity, and so that's where I started my work. Actually, so literally, I have a book on fragile states, the first book ever written on fragile states and I've spent the last 15 years of my this is my career helping countries based upon that book and additional books and work. And the main entry point for me is always how do we build stronger relationships, how do we build stronger institutions? Because that will help countries thrive. And the journey continues in terms of.
Speaker 1:I did this book, my recent book and my recent research because people started asking me what is wrong with our country, what is wrong with America, and when that happened, over and over again, I said I have to delve into it, but in terms of my personal journey. So I mean, I did not grow up religious but at one point I was attracted to religion because religion especially, I felt, if you went to the right, I went to my tradition. But also I was very selective in terms of the part of my tradition. I went to the part that was most community oriented, the most communitarian, and then in terms of so that was one step I made and that was like a journey over about 10 years to get a little bit, little bit more and more religious, and so that was one part.
Speaker 1:But then when I decided, when I was thinking about where to live after I got married, I literally looked at half a dozen neighborhoods. I lived in New York. I didn't find it too community oriented People. I love New York, a lot of dynamism, but people are not so close to each other. So we literally my wife and I, looked in New Jersey, looked in Pennsylvania, looked in Maryland and I was always looking in the direction of Washington because I had work here, and ultimately we chose a place. A neighbor actually in Brooklyn says why don't you try this community? And this place where I live now is amazing. So I'm so thrilled, but it really was. It was very intentional and it was a lot of choices along the way that kept leading me into more community oriented lifestyle. So it's almost like I've chosen many things to have a better lifestyle.
Speaker 2:And I'm on that journey right now, seth. So I'm slapping this up and I've been exploring, like two years ago I took my family into an eco village where we lived for four months to experience how it felt to live in community. Now, this was quite an intense version of home living.
Speaker 1:Is that near Victoria? Where is that?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's just. It was in Shawnegan Lake, so about an hour north of Victoria, and we had our own home, but it had very limited kitchen facilities, so we we ate in community like 13 meals a week, wow so very, very intense. Like a massive learning experience it was how large was the community?
Speaker 1:how many people?
Speaker 2:it fluctuated between about 12 people in the depths of winter up to about 30.
Speaker 1:So it was a really small. It's not like I live in like a thousand family community, so that's like really small. So you literally shared your lives with, sounds to me, with seven, 10, whatever families yeah, so that was.
Speaker 2:It was a huge learning experience not not an environment that I wish to repeat, but I do love the idea of co-living in a way, um, but co-living in that you would maybe have weekly meals in community, because I know that the weekly the regularity of doing something weekly, which is why what you did sound sounds a bit too intense for me.
Speaker 1:I mean I don't want to be eating every meal with people. It also sounds like a very inefficient, if I may say that, and you may not want to talk to everybody if you live in a. For me, the key thing with community of course faith and religion matters. I mean it would be great if we could have in my area there's six houses of worship, so there's a variety that people can join. But I would say it's the size that's very important.
Speaker 1:I mean, for me this is a great size because that means we are big enough to have the community institutions and yet we're small enough to have diversity. I mean we're big enough but we're also big enough to have the diversity. We're small enough that we can more or less know all the institutions. We can always know of somebody through somebody. We're not like a 50,000. 50,000 doesn't work, 20,000 doesn't work. I think 10,000 is stretching it, a thousand like houses, families. I mean that is a really good size for a community because you've more or less got everything you need but you don't have a lot more than you need and you have an intimacy and a cohesion that's great when you get much smaller than that. It's more of a stretch every day in terms of what you're doing and how about the congregation at your church?
Speaker 2:I wonder how many are in.
Speaker 1:I mean, I'm Jewish, so it's synagogue, but we're roughly about 300 families or 300 people and that's. I think that's a good size. I mean, there's mega churches which are over the top and I wonder how you get community in a mega church. I think you can probably get it in pieces, but I wonder if you're just involved with lots of networks and not not community. So in a sense, I mean for me, I, I, I think 300, 200, 300, 400, that's a really good size in terms of families or households, but the key thing is regular and lots of other institutions the school, the church or house of worship or synagogue and then we also have places to eat and you have other activities going on.
Speaker 1:So you really are like a whole ecosystem. It's an ecosystem that you can engage as much as you want. If you want to stay in your home and just show up whatever once a week, you can do that. I mean, there are people who don't even show up once a week but they sort of know enough people that they're in the system. But if it's just one institution, I think it's much harder to have a community and what you described in terms of just that small number. That sounds a little suffocating for me, to be very honest it felt it a lot of the time.
Speaker 1:You need this attention between having too much and too little. I would say most of us have far too little. So what you described was sort of an opposite extreme. But I think if you have a larger group and again many institutions, and again the role of place is so important, I can't get this online, I can't get this by just go. I mean, again, I'm Jewish but I tell my Christian friends, if you just go once a week and you're leaving and then your kids go some other place, that's not related. Where's the community? It's just a bunch of networks. So again, the role of place is so important.
Speaker 2:And just you mentioned about not getting this online, but obviously we have access to have communities online now, and I do.
Speaker 1:Are they communities, if I may say that we use the term, but is that really a community?
Speaker 2:Well, I do wonder, and actually this is something that I am working on, so I've created a concept called the communiverse, and the idea for the communiverse is you do the work to identify who the key players are in your life, whether they live around the corner from you or they live the other side of the world from you and like finding what regularity you want to have in your relationships.
Speaker 2:And maybe it doesn't need to be that structured, but just understanding you know you can feel into.
Speaker 2:If you haven't spoken to one of your key players for a month, then you probably want to be picking up the phone to reconnect with them, but then kind of widening that out and then thinking about what, what groups you are you are involved with, because we've all got maximum capacity in our lives and I think it's so easy to um get overwhelmed by the number of groups you join and communities you join, particularly online.
Speaker 2:So it's finding that balance to gain that I love the term that you use um social wealth. So finding a balance to to really maximize your social wealth by knowing what your limitations are. So we're not using all of our digital time on social media, for instance, in what a lot of people are doing. I think the sats are saying people are spending between two and a half and three and a half hours a day on social media and for some of us I know, like LinkedIn is a fantastic professional tool that I am definitely have a slight addiction to which I do try and manage. But just thinking about, yeah, communities both on and offline can be really nourishing and spending time in those communities versus going on social media and being exposed to thousands of people on different channels every day.
Speaker 1:So I believe I think what you're suggesting is most likely going to work if it's hybrid. I mean, the thing is you're basing it upon embodied relationships and using the virtual to support the strength of those that I think can work. I would say that if you only have virtual ties with people and there's no embodied relationship underlying it, I'm more skeptical that that can actually be a community, because people can come and go and there's, there's, there's not, there's not the same type of glue and there's not the same type of um I would say um glue as well as penalties If you, if you are not a good character in the, in the network and to the extent that you have, if you have whatever and again it's a question of how large could that be? So if you're talking about, let's say, 15 people and you're doing something like that and that you're complementing some embodied with some virtual, I mean that could be really very helpful for people. I just don't believe you can have a completely virtual community.
Speaker 2:Thank you for sharing that. I think that's really an important nugget and something that I'm sure a lot of people haven't thought of, but I do. Also, on the flip side, I do think having a digital relationship with individuals that we know personally in person can really deepen our relationships yes, so as an example um, let's see if there's distance yes, yes. So when I first moved over here from the UK in 2021, feeling incredibly disconnected, I really heard my soul calling, which was to help people feel connected which was ironic because I didn't.
Speaker 2:I had to start with myself first. So I set about exploring the metaverse and inviting friends and family groups into spaces that I created, and I really did find particularly one group of school friends. We've all been friends for many decades. We had three digital catch ups before. I then went back to the UK in the summer and then we had a beautiful picnic family day in the park and in that day we all had our kids there and we didn't need to talk about, like, a lot of the topics, a lot of what's been happening on our lives, because we'd had those digital catch-ups in between. So we were able to really just be in presence with each other. So I really do feel like that hybrid those digital interactions in between physical catch-ups really did enhance the feeling of connectedness. When we did catch-ups I think it can.
Speaker 1:I think it can because you already know the people and you have trust, you have some sense of interdependency, sense of care. And then I think I mean I see it even in my neighborhood. In my neighborhood, technology is mostly bonding because we all know each other. We have a community WhatsApp groups. I mean we have many of them and I mean I can just give an example of we have. I mean I'm on one of the groups and one of the groups I was in Denver recently giving some talk or something and I had finished and I was waiting, spending the rest of the day there before I was going to fly back to where I live in Washington, and one of the groups I noticed that it popped up that somebody was reporting a missing child and all of a sudden all these volunteers appeared on the group. And so I think you're talking about people you know well personally, but in this case, because we're I mean so I totally think that's important.
Speaker 1:In this case, I don't think everybody actually knew each other, but they were all tied together because they were in a. Maybe this group had a couple hundred people maximum, but they all were neighbors, they all knew each other, they all had some connection and boom, you had maybe 20 or so volunteers. We're going to meet at 4 pm. In fact they weren't going to meet. We're going to go and search at 4 pm, like an hour later, and they all went off in different directions. I'm going to this woods, I'm going up this street, I'm going behind the supermarket, I'm going here and within an hour or whatever of searching, they had found the kid and then the texts were. I went this far. Can somebody pick me up Because I'm down by this, I'm over there and the whole thing start to finish is maybe four hours and boom, that was because they knew each other.
Speaker 1:But tech, so tech, I think can be really helpful in helping people when they are in need, keeping people well connected, but I think there really has to be an embodied relationship before and so if you have whatever number of people in your lives and you're connected to them regularly, or if you could be family, friends, classmates, I certainly think you could do a lot with that and you could talk about positive tech or tech cultivating depth or bonding in my relationships. I think that is great. I just think if you start from zero, it's it doesn't have the same outcome is what I have. Especially when you get to large numbers and people can come and go, that's really hard.
Speaker 1:So for people who are feeling for giving me, for having strong opinions on the topic.
Speaker 2:No, I love it. So for people who are feeling like a sense of disconnect maybe they're now working, but they don't live in anything that they would call a community what could they do? What could they practically to really start themselves to feeling connected in their community and in their digital lives as well? Where would you suggest they start?
Speaker 1:Again, people have great they're great differences in situations. So I hate to give one or one thing that will fit everybody, but I would always start again. I'm really. I really think some sort of embodied relationship is a good place to start. And so I would be looking is there a neighbor? Is there a local institution? I mean you could start volunteering. You can look for places where people gather.
Speaker 1:I mean, the problem is some of our neighborhoods or places where people live today, they're not neighborhoods, they're just a bunch of houses and streets. And if you're on a cul-de-sac if you know what a cul-de-sac is like a dead end, we sometimes use that term as well. I mean, it's easy because people sort of relate that we have some physical connection to each other, so it's okay. But if you just live on a street and the cars are coming back and forth and that's all that is around you, what is it that? But I would say, look for ways to meet neighbors. Can you have a block party, can you invite some people over for a meal? But of course it's always easier if you have one or two other people with you.
Speaker 1:Imagine there was three of you and you were doing something together. You would have more courage, you would have more connections to start with. You know a few, they know a few, the third person, all three. So I'd be looking for those few neighbors. I'd be looking for what activity can you start? Can you repeat that activity? I would be looking.
Speaker 1:If some of that seems hard, is there something near where you live that you can volunteer for and then show up? I was recently in Los Angeles with a good friend of mine and she had relocated there near her parents and she was surprised how atomized Los Angeles was. She was from the East Coast and people there are, just they don't have many, they're not strong on relationships. So she basically was looking for activities that she could go to with a lot of other newcomers. I mean, la is huge so it's not a great example.
Speaker 1:But imagine you live in a neighborhood. Where is it that you go? What activity could you join? What volunteer activity could you do? What organization could you join that enables you to meet people in a relaxed environment?
Speaker 1:I tend to find intentionally looking to meet people is not as good as if you're doing something with people. If you have a goal, we're going to work together to help, so-and-so, and then if you spend like I wrote about. I researched and wrote about an organization in Detroit and one of their main activities is six days of volunteer activities to improve neighborhoods, remove blight, beautify, repair some houses. So if you are in Detroit that's not quite your immediate neighborhood. But if you join that and you spend a day or two volunteering with other people, maybe you will be finding some people there in an environment that's not there to meet people. But because you're working with people closely for the day, you're likely to be relaxed and get to know people. So I would always be looking for things like that. Ideally, you find a few people and then you have partners to work with and ultimately I believe neighborhoods are key because that is where we start with embodied relationships and the more people you know locally, the more likely you're going to have social wealth.
Speaker 2:Beautiful, beautiful. I've just read a paper by Robin Dunbar I don't know if he's on your radar, he's a British anthropologist, so it was a recent paper and it was called the neurobiology of, of social distance and they came to there's a 30 minute cut off, so if you live within a 30 minute radius of somebody, your chances measured by?
Speaker 1:measured by walking or driving, or what?
Speaker 2:Exactly Any form of form whatever you you use.
Speaker 2:So if you're not able to drive, then it'd need to be walking distance, so whatever you're able. And so I was like, wow, that is really a critical knowing for me, somebody that hasn't yet put down roots. Um, to be more intentional and I love how intentional you were by looking for that neighborhood. So for me, I have a lot of beautiful connections back home in the UK and if that is gonna be where we end up landing, then knowing that 30 minute rule to then be intentional about okay, well, who do I really really want in my life? And then let's look at a 30 minute radius of these particular individuals, if that, if that works, I think that's really powerful to consider as a starting point for somebody that is going to be moving location.
Speaker 1:Yes, 30 minutes is good. I mean, in terms of a neighborhood, roughly 30 minutes walking, that's a pretty good, pretty good number for a neighborhood. My, my oldest child, who just turned 12, she will go in. About three quarters of her classmates live within 30 minutes walking. So she's able to go out um in the daytime and she can go to any of those houses and she's walking. That's what she's doing and I'm thrilled that she just does that. I mean, she probably does that about once a week, maybe more now because we're in the summer.
Speaker 1:But that 30 minutes is a really good number and if it's so, I would say in general, I like that If it's within even closer. I mean I use walking and then you can get a couple of other people, then you begin to have. It begins to have a cascading impact as opposed to 30 minutes driving. There could be five million people If you're 30 minutes walking. I mean, I live in a suburb. You're probably talking about thousands of people, so if you could actually get a few of those and then they probably know a few others and then a few others and it begins to have a cascading impact on the people that you know beautiful.
Speaker 2:You've traveled a great deal around the world. What have you learned that you've really brought back to incorporate into your life and your way of living that you would love to share, to inspire other people about, potentially, the way that they choose to live their lives?
Speaker 1:I think clearly my whole focus on relationships that's a product of my travel. I mean, I first went off just out of curiosity, but the fact that I spent so many years and I continue to spend time working on basically fragile states, fragile countries, conflict-prone countries, fragile countries, conflict-prone countries one of the reasons is because I find the richness of the relationships, the way people treat each other in these places, I find them welcoming, I find them warm, I find them enticing, I find myself comfortable in that type of relational environment and I find that the wealthier places I mean we're talking now about English-speaking countries mostly there's so many great things that we might have because we're materially well-off, we have infrastructure, we have efficiency, but we don't emphasize relationships. We tend to emphasize our individual self and there's a balance there's always going to be a balance between your individual and the relationships. But if you ask me what clearly has had a strong impact on me, it's just this feeling of warmth and relationships that I've got from people and relationships that I've got from people. I think it's affected all parts of my life choice.
Speaker 1:Even the person I've married comes from one of these fragile places. She originally came. She comes from the poorest country in Europe, a place in Eastern Europe, and so she comes from a very relational culture. It's just my culture. I feel most comfortable with very relationship. I would use the term thick societies In fact I use that in one of my books thick versus thin. We in the English speaking world we live in a very thin society mostly not always and not everywhere, Depends where you are but I've always felt myself much more comfortable in thick societies with thick bonds and thick institutions and I would say, thick norms. We should do this now, we should do that then, and that's not for everybody, but I find it very comforting.
Speaker 1:So, that's probably the thing that I bring back the most is this appreciation, this emphasis. I'm sure it's affected my choices about becoming more religious, because a lot of these places people are very religious and it's affected, I mean, everything from my desire to live in a thicker community to my desire in terms of how I spend my time. I don't send money mostly to faraway charities. I look for charities close to home. I don't volunteer for faraway charities. I'm on the board of a local nonprofit and I help with another nonprofit and so on and so forth. These are all the things because I believe the more I focus on the local, the more, the more the local will give to me or I'll give to the local. I just find this to be a very and so I think, if you ask me what I bring back, it's not a particular thing. It's this mindset and this culture. Um, I must have had some of it before, but it's certainly all come out much richer because of all my experiences in many countries.
Speaker 2:I don't know why, but the comedian Dave Chappelle is coming to my mind. Um quite a lot of his um, his uh like shows and his documentaries and and he he's always returned to his hometown and he's very grounded you know that. I didn't know that and he's just so happy and he's, and everyone knows him, everybody knows him, and he's just Dave it's a different experience.
Speaker 1:I I mean honestly it's different experience. I think the virtual does give us the opportunity. I mean I have. I know people.
Speaker 1:They said I don't need to live in Washington DC, I can move back. I have a former classmate a classmate not a classmate, a student. She says I'm moving back to Cleveland, I can continue my career. I can do it all virtually. I'll just fly when I have to and I'll live near my parents because we have a better community in Cleveland and I have more family and classmates and all that there.
Speaker 1:And so I believe more of us want to do that than we are. Technology it could allow us to make those choices. We ourselves have to make those choices, but the technology means we miss less, we have access to more and we can stay vested in smaller places, places where people actually know each other, care for each other in a way that they don't, and sometimes in big cities, especially in my country, on the coast. On the coast they're more like people came there from elsewhere and they're strangers, but if you go to the heartland you tend to know people much more yeah, there's definitely been a theme that's been running through my recent conversations about the return and the return yes, hero's journey.
Speaker 2:And and so many of us go on this big worldwide exploration only to really feel the yearning to return, but returning with fresh eyes.
Speaker 1:Yes. So there's organizations that help people do that. For example, in America we have Lead for America that helps people from top universities go back and don't basically change their career path. So they're going home and they can be leaders at 25 as opposed to being in a big city and some big organizations. They're not gonna be leaders until they're 45.
Speaker 1:But I also think this idea of the return I mean you should make a movie with that title and then you did different examples, but I think that's like. That's like it can be a chapter you left home at whatever age and then you have whatever chapter one chapter, two chapters, and then at whatever age. I mean I have another person I know well. She basically she even has a book in which she laments being away from her family and the community and then finally and the whole book is about do I go home, do I stay? And after she wrote the book, within a year she actually went home. She moved back to Boise, idaho, after spending maybe 10 or 15 years away from the place, and so she's not exactly where she grew up, but she's within probably 30 minutes there's your 30 minutes from where she grew up. She's in a medium sized city city, but close to her farm. Basically, she grew up on a farm.
Speaker 2:I drove through Boise just a few weeks back, so lucky you.
Speaker 1:I wish I had the time to do Utah and Idaho.
Speaker 1:That sounds it was so cool to drive through, oh wow it sounds like you were in a car a lot, but it's so much. Yeah, going to. I'm taking my kids to West Virginia the day after tomorrow, so it's completely different side of the. I'm taking my kids to West Virginia the day after tomorrow, so it's completely different side of the of the continent, but we're going deep into the mountains and the just for the beauty of it. Actually, so lucky you. I wish I, I wish I could do that so easily, but it takes a plane to get there. I'm not driving to Boise, sorry, it's probably about 2000 miles.
Speaker 2:The other case study for this book, the Return, is Bruce Springsteen.
Speaker 1:Oh yes, his famous story, yeah, the Born to Run.
Speaker 2:And now he lives 10 minutes from his hometown.
Speaker 1:Yes, If you study his, I didn't include it, but when I researched for what I wrote about, I actually have a paragraph on Bruce Springsteen that got cut, and the paragraph talks about how he's this world-famous star, but actually many of his songs are about where he grew up in Jersey, new Jersey and I even have a couple of quotes from his songs about his yearning for home. So it's not only that he lives there, but listen to his lyrics, read what they say, and they're often yearning for home. So actually, yes, he's a great example.
Speaker 2:I can feel it, I feel the yearn. All right. Well, seth, this has been such a beautiful and nourishing conversation. Is there anything that we haven't said, that you feel a yearning to share about yourself, your work, your recent latest book?
Speaker 1:um, well, first of all, I give an open offer to you, shelly, or anyone listening watching. If I can be helpful in any way, by all means find me on. Yes, linkedin is a great way to meet people, or you can go to sethcaplinorg. And if you're looking for ways to improve your community, your neighborhood, your city, by all means but please read Fragile Neighborhoods. But I think the thing I would leave people with is think local, think hyper-local, if you can think balance.
Speaker 1:We need to invest in our relationships and our place for them to invest in us. If we want them to be there for us, we have to be there for them. Be a steward, like stand up and be a steward. Be a person who has a commitment to your place. And I would say take some risks, don't be afraid that things don't work out the first time. Find partners, find allies, find organizations and by all means, get to it and let's roll up our hands and roll up our sleeves, if I may say and I don't think it's always easy but our lives will be richer for it and our societies will be better for it.
Speaker 2:Beautifully said. I appreciate you, Seth. It's been beautiful to connect and I really hope we reconnect and stay connected in the future.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much. By all means, find me if I can be helpful in any way, shelley, to you or your friends network, whatever watchers, by all means. Thank you so much. A great pleasure.
