We Kick Off Season Seven with Mister Mystery – Kirk Brown! – Transcript

Eric: [00:00:00] Welcome to, let’s Hear It. Let’s Hear. It is a podcast for and about the field of foundation and nonprofit communications produced by its two co-hosts, Eric Brown and Kirk Brown. No relation

Kirk: who well said Eric. And I’m Kirk.

Eric: And I’m Eric.

Eric  : The podcast is sponsored by the College Futures Foundation, which envisions a California where post-secondary education advances equity and unlocks upward mobility now and for generations to come to learn more.

Visit college futures.org.

Kirk: You can find, let’s hear it on any podcast subscription

Eric: platform.

Eric  : You can find us online at, let’s hear@cast.com. You can find us on LinkedIn and yes,

Kirk: even on Instagram. And if you like the show please rate us on Apple Podcasts so that more people can find us.

Eric: Let’s get onto the show.

Kirk: So I’m wondering if we should start the new year with the new way of opening this podcast.

Eric: Wait, what?

Kirk: I’m just wondering if we should,

Eric: what happened? What happened to welcome in?

Kirk: I see. That’s my question. Should we, should 2025 be [00:01:00] the year that we say thank you? You were with us for years. Goodbye to Welcom in, or do you think we should keep welcoming people in?

Eric: No, I think we should stop welcoming people in.

Kirk: Yeah, we just cut right into it. I think the welcome in is, so we’re retiring the welcome in. It’s, we just retired it.

Eric: Oh,

Kirk: it’s a new year. It’s not a New Year’s resolution. It’s a New Year’s theme.

Eric: Okay.

Kirk: Somebody gave me this idea recently. Don’t do resolutions, just do themes for the year.

I see. And so one theme is gonna be, we’re just gonna start talking.

Eric: We, oh. Just in the, we’re gonna start the the movie in the middle of the car chase.

Kirk: That’s right. We, because dead people are immediately boom, they don’t have to hit that five second, 15 second advance through the welcome in.

They can just tear down the content.

Eric: I think they just skip to the interview and then turn it off. Hi Kirk.

Kirk  : That’s the meanest thing you’ve ever said to me.

Eric: Hi. Happy new Year. Happy new Year.

Kirk: We’re back in the mic. Can we start though by saying, ’cause we’re both in California, but we are in Northern California.

Yeah. The fires are raging in Los Angeles. We don’t typically do the real time [00:02:00] thing, but we have to say something about, just as it’s awful. It’s horrible. Have you known, do you know anybody who got Yes. Lost? Yeah.

Eric: Yeah. I have three, three different sets of friends or family who were evacuated from three different fires.

Ah, so it is, it’s pervasive. And I actually think Kirk that, that context is. It’s gonna lead us up into some of the conversation that we have today. Okay. ’cause, because of the threat of the climate change is here, those apocalyptic things that we heard about, that were gonna happen sometime into the distant future when whole cities would be laid waste to Yeah.

That’s happening right now. There’s a fire burn. There’s larger than the size of the city of San Francisco. Yeah. Yeah. So these things are real. And yes, it’s been a very challenging week. Spent a lot of time on that fire watch thing app. ’cause I’m just, and I have my, all my friends and family’s houses plotted.

And these fires are pushing against their homes are, one friend was evacuated at four 30 in the morning.

Kirk: Yeah. And anybody who’s lived [00:03:00] close and around or under the threat of fire knows, like you actually have to stay on top of it. 24. Oh. You may or may not be in the path of it, but that can change in a heartbeat.

And then when the san, if you’ve never experienced these Santa Anna winds. What they do to fire. And now the videos that are going around are showing people what this looks like. But it’s like a 100 foot high miles wide blowtorch running through communities. And there’s literally, once it starts, there’s, I don’t know that there’s a technology on earth that can stop it.

So the fact that these things are just running and rolling and can’t be stopped as long as the wind is pushing this stuff along. Right. All you can really do is get out of the way. And so just, it’s just awful. Yeah. It’s

Eric: just awful. Terrible. Really terrible.

Kirk: Yeah. Yeah. I remember when I first moved to California, I was talking to somebody about this ’cause I hadn’t experienced it and from the Midwest, and so I was like what? You can’t, what if you could just spray water all over your house, and there are like fire, there are fire defense systems that kind do this now but they just kinda laughed at me and they’re like, you don’t understand this. Yeah, this is like a 10 story building, but it’s fire and it’s just coming at you at a [00:04:00] hundred miles per hour.

So there’s just, and again the videos that are going around a trying to let people see what that looks like. So it’s horrible. Thoughts to everybody? Yes, indeed. It’s just awful. Mr. Brown, it’s the new year. Yes. Yes. It’s New Year for the podcast. Thank you for keeping

Kirk  : us, keeping on, you’ve kept us on track.

Yeah. You’ve done all the work. I wanna make that really clear. You’ve done all the, for that happens to be true, but thank you. Yes. So what do you have in store for us as we started New Year?

Eric: Kirk, we have an extremely interesting really one of the most fascinating people I’ve ever known.

I couldn’t agree more. Our guest is going to be really interesting because that guest, my good friend is you. Okay. We are going, I am going to interview you because people say, who the hell is Kirk Brown? What is the story? He, you do all the interviewing and then he comes on around and does, asks a bunch of questions.

It’s true. So I wanna know more about this clearly fascinating international man of mystery.

Kirk  : Let’s just keep the mystery part. So you’re saying that we’re gonna start the new year with hitting a new low for the [00:05:00] podcast, but you’re gonna be interviewing me. It’s a new low for the podcast.

Eric: We’ll just see about that.

Kirk  : Okay, then this would be Kirk Brown, the mystery co-host on Let’s Hear it. Odd. Let’s hear it. So let’s go to the interview and welcome back.

Eric: Welcome to, let’s Hear It. My guest today is a fascinating human being a true renaissance man. He’s in, he is everything. He is a raconteur. He is a business owner.

He is an international man of mystery. He is another none other than yes, Kirk Brown. Kirk, welcome to, let’s hear it. It’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Kirk: It’s such a pleasure to be doing this. And I have to say you do that so well, I feel so invited in and whoever put you up to doing this, we owe that person.

I don’t know who that person is, but we owe that person an enormous debt because like you have really developed and the range of guests, the way you have these conversations it’s a pleasure. And that is gonna be [00:06:00] memorialized held for all time this work you’ve done. So thank you, sir.

It’s just, it’s whoa. Another LED

Eric: fan fanboy. Yes. I’m so glad that you listened to the show. I love this podcast. It’s, I’m just delighted that you listened and thank you for coming on.

Kirk  : Yeah. Happy to be here. I’m glad we could fit it into my schedule.

Eric: So Kirk when I came up with the crazy idea to interview you for the show?

Yeah. Because a lot of folks just asked me who’s this guy? Who is this Kirk Brown? What does he do? Why should I listen to him? What makes him, that’s a good question. What’s what’s going on here? And so I figured, this would be a good venue to, to be able to tell that story, to tell the Kirk Brown story.

And I’m very much looking forward to this interview. Why don’t we get to the beginning? Uhhuh, let’s, so we, everybody knows that you’re from the Midwest, right? Anyway, who listens to this show knows that you’re from the mid, some amorphous. Plays, which is a big blob in the middle of America.

Kirk: Native Iowa. Native of Iowa. Really important. Native, yeah,

Eric: native Iowan. So Iowa is important. What is it, what’s important [00:07:00] about Iowa that makes Kirk Brown tick?

Kirk: So it’s great to be an Iowan and I have to tell you, this is really everything I’m about to say is true which is always important to you.

Gotta double check that when you’re talking to me. You gotta make sure it’s, and a

Kirk (4): plus,

Kirk: it’s always a plus. So having now lived since I grew up and left Iowa, grew up in and then left Iowa, I’ve lived in Washington, dc, New York City, Philadelphia, then on the West coast, I’ve seen my fair share of the United States.

And one of the things people don’t understand about growing up in the Middle West, at least when I grew up there, and this might be different, but today, but you can live a very humble life in the Midwest, but feel like you’re a multimillionaire. When I look back at it from the context of people living in other places, iowa, what did it have When I was growing up, it had some of the best education in the country. It was all free. It had incredible access to services, so great healthcare. It was totally clean and safe. We were like, like so many kids, we were running as feral children out for hours and days at a time and streets in a way that my own 15-year-old daughter has never once had [00:08:00] that experience in her life.

But the other thing about Iowa that’s really interesting, and it’s funny, this kind of makes me think about Chris Dardi when he talked us through why western Pennsylvania is the center of the universe. Like you live in these places and you realize how deeply connected they are to the bigger trends that we find across our country.

So one thing that’s interesting about Iowa is that it doesn’t have a discernible or noticeable accent. And so for years, really, when there was such thing as broadcast news and broadcast television, the broadcaster sounded like they were from places like Iowa. So I felt connected very deeply to all of these voices that were coming at us, at all these highfalutin places like New York City.

But the other thing about Iowa, back in the day, it held the Iowa Caucus every four years. And so if you are gonna be president of the United States, you had to go through Iowa. And Iowa was retail politics. It was cafe by cafe, town by town. It was you shook heads, you kissed babies. And so when you grew up in that environment, you know they would flood into the hotels.

I lived in a suburb outside of the [00:09:00] great mighty city called Des Moines, Iowa. I lived in a suburb outside of it, but you would come into the hotels in downtown Des Moines during the caucus season. Every news outlet, every political reporter, every luminary would roll through Des Moines. So suddenly. Here you are, this little kid.

Both my parents were public school teachers. So you’re this little kid, very humble situation growing up in this little classic sub suburb outside this Midwestern town. But you felt like the entire world was coming to knock on your door because it was. And so somehow you’re in this tiny little, in obscure, poor place.

And I think actually there might be fewer people living in Iowa today than there were like a hundred years ago because of the drain that’s happened for family farms and ag. So you had this that sense. And then the last piece, and this is something I thought about only after I was doing communications work, but Iowa is centered in the agriculture economy and the price of corn, the price of soybean, the price of whatever pig futures.

That’s not set in Des Moines. It’s not set in [00:10:00] Chicago. You grew up being in this economy that’s set connected to global commodity markets. And so even though life, and I was very dictated by the weather, and my parents would get up they, they would sit down promptly at 6:00 PM every night to watch the local news.

And at six 15 the weather would come on and they would track it diligently, what’s the weather? Because the weather, the entire economy was very linked to the weather. Was there gonna be enough rain? Was it gonna be too hot? Whatever was there, were there gonna be crops? You grew up with the sensibility that even though you’re in this little off, ’cause you’re a New Yorker, right?

So you’ve lived in all these places that are

Kirk  : like in the, literally the center of the universe.

Eric: Yeah. We also have no discernible accent by the way.

Kirk  : Fair. Fair enough. But let’s take a tour. So of the summer, let’s take sort so the boroughs and we’ll have that conversation. All right. You may be right.

I don’t know, maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re not. You could say

Kirk: exactly. Exactly. But, so here you are in this little offshoot of the world in a way. But you’re having this experience where you feel so deeply connected to everything that’s happening everywhere. So that was growing up in Iowa.

Now I have to say I was [00:11:00] ready to lead it. And so when I was done with high school and my whole period of growing up, and I think somehow my Midwestern parents somehow inculcated this in all their kids. I knew that I was gonna leave Iowa, so the second that I graduated from high school, I was headed off to college in Minnesota.

1. From there, I jumped off. I worked and lived in Washington, DC for a period of time before I came to California. But that’s the origin story. My little tattooing, growing up in the desert. That’s me growing up in Iowa. But it’s a really interesting, in my, in retrospect, I think back and I’m like, it’s actually a really interesting jumping off point for coming into the world.

When you start in a place that’s, off the beaten path, it’s small enough that you can feel like a big fish. You don’t know how small of a pond it really is but you just feel this sense of presence and identity and I’ll tell you that one, one place where that really was challenged.

I spent some summers in college working in New York City. It was there for the first time. I looked out on this backdrop of all these apartments and I’m like, I am just an obscure nothing. There’s millions of people I could [00:12:00] vanish from the earth in a heartbeat and no one would know or care, and I, I actually never had that sense once in my life until I actually got into big cities, big places where there are tons of people. As a kid growing up in Iowa, I really felt like I mattered, and people all around you made you feel like you mattered, so that’s actually as a parent, that’s actually something that I’ve really thought about and tried to do in my old household.

Even though we live in, in, in the San Francisco Bay area, which is also a big and can be lonely place, but that feeling of you matter, that’s such an important connecting point for the world. And that’s what I had growing up and it took me years and years as a person to be able to have that reflection back and be like, wow, that’s actually where I came from.

And I’m actually really grateful for that.

Eric: This is interesting because usually when I interview a guest, I don’t tend to analyze what they just said quite the way I’m about to do it now, but I feel like I have permission.

Kirk  : You do. You have every opportunity to do it,

Eric: but it’s clear to see how this sensibility, your Iowa sensibility, which I knew you were from Iowa.

I thought it [00:13:00] was, I thought you were maybe from Iowa, but also possibly from Minnesota or Wisconsin or Michigan or some other place.

Kirk: It all blends together

Eric: inside it all. There is, like I say, there’s this thing in the middle of the country, but this experience that you had in Iowa clearly animates everything you do.

Kirk (4): ’cause

Eric: your work is about it. ’cause Iowa is susceptible to weather. If weather is your life

Kirk (4): Yeah.

Eric: Then changing weather changes your life.

Kirk (4): Yeah.

Eric: And if the way that we communicate and our own sense of who we are is important, then communications. Is essential. Yeah. And getting it right is really important.

So it feels to me like this combination of climate, environment and communications have come together for and it feels to me like they emanate from your Iowa childhood. Is that fair thing to say? For

Kirk: sure. They grow out of that. They grow out that root. And it’s funny because that experience of growing up and then it was really honed as I [00:14:00] became a professional and grew through the world, but there’s two big.

Ideas there. And I, it’s funny ’cause sometimes you and I dance around this idea, and I’ve thought about this in retrospect, to do some of our conversations and also I know what gets said versus what gets in the final cut. And

Kirk  : there’s some things that I say on this pod, wait, I, there’s sometimes, you know what you say and there’s sometimes things I say on this podcast that do not make the final cut.

And I’m always appreciative. Appreciative, oh, okay. Of your finely tuned editorial sensibility when you’re not lodging a complaint when you no. I, no, I would have no basis to make any complaints

Kirk: about any of the work. You’ve, the massive work you’ve done to this.

But this is a sensibility, and again, this gets honed from seeing how political campaigns work. Being just saturated with that every year. Seeing how like every political campaign, you and I could probably go back through every presidential and come up with the one big idea that laid claim to the entire national psyche for some.

Key sixty, ninety, a hundred twenty, maybe as long as 360 day period that then the second the presidential [00:15:00] finished evaporates entirely from the public conversation. Be it Hillary Clinton’s emails, be it the swift boat, be it Dukakis of the tank, be it, you know what, whatever it is. But, so you know, when you’re in Des Moines and you’re growing up and you’re seeing how that works and you’re really feeling the impact of it, one of my big takeaways, and this has really honed for me in my professional life, I really do believe we live in an information environment that is just the sum of all the campaigns that target us all the time.

And that’s a key sensibility that I wish I first, I’d love to really interrogate and understand how true it is because I might be living on my own island with that sensibility but I really view the entire information climate as nothing more than the sum of all these campaigns. And it’s funny, like when I was running a nonprofit that just ran media relations campaigns for environmental campaigns all over the country.

I said this to one of my people who just loved journalism. They just loved they held the New York Times in such esteem. This is the ivory tower. I worship at that tower every day when I have my New York Times. This is back [00:16:00] when we were still reading it as a physical, and I was like, which I

Eric: do.

So every morning it lands on my front step and I take it in and I open it and I read it. Go ahead. So then

Kirk: you’re a good person to ask this question then too. We don’t have, we can’t explore it now. We can explore it later because there’s a second related idea here. But this notion about all, everything is a campaign.

What percent of What’s in the New York Times when you read it, and I’m talking about every single page, every single section, not just the front page, not just the political stuff. What percent reflects a campaign versus some a jour our notion of a journalist looking at the world this unformed thing.

Yeah. And they’re drawing on their experiences to pull out, what about this, what about that? Like in, in my experience, a huge percentage of those stories that we’re reading. Are actually being delivered into those outlets. Yes, they’re being curated by editorial conversations and policy.

Yeah. But they all reflect campaigns. So that’s one big key. And that’s that gets you to communication side. But then, the climate side, the notion that the climate that we live in, the weather that holds us, the air that we breathe [00:17:00] like that it’s so fundamental to how we think about the world and how we understand it.

Like when I walked into an office in Washington, DC and I’m in my twenties, and this was right after the first conference on environment that Al Gore went down to, and these issues popped and it that notion that we were gonna bake and burn the planet and it was gonna be unlivable and it was gonna devastate economies and devastate people That caught me.

And it’s funny, it grabbed me in a hallway into Washington DC I it guided all the work I did when I was in Washington DC and it’s been a guiding principle for me to work on that topic my entire career. And I do believe it does track back to being a five-year-old kid, watching my parents, watching my dad literally.

Draw the circle of the of the weather systems as they were coming across the planes headed into Iowa. I definitely think it’s related.

Eric: The other thing is that if you are an observer, if you live in nature, or if you are I mean for, I have, I’ve said this for a long time.

The ranchers, the farmers, those folks, they understand that [00:18:00] things are changing. You get it. Yeah. They, you can’t, all you have to do is observe. Yeah. And it has, if your life is really affected by the weather

Kirk  : Yeah.

Eric: However defined, then you understand the changes. Yeah. Now, the trick is, are the changes. So what, where are the, where do you make your decisions?

However, because if your own sense of belonging is tied into your community, your neighbors, your church, your other, what other people are saying. Then your own interest, which is the climate is changing versus your other interests, your competing interests, which is that people are never gonna talk to me if I complain about the fact that the climate is changing.

Then you make decisions that are go against your own data.

Kirk (4): Yeah.

Eric: And instead they are made in favor of your own allegiance or membership in a club. And that’s something that we can, we, we’ll be talk, we’ve been talking about this for a long time. We’ll talk about it for a lot longer, but it feels to me like there’s this incredible tension.

And the question is, when will [00:19:00] that tension be? When will it be sorted out in a way that helps us to make better decisions? But that’s a conversation for another time. But I wanna get back to you, Kirk, and just take me through your resume from leaving Iowa to sitting in this chair right now.

But you have to do it in less than five minutes. Yeah, I’ll do that. Can I? Yeah, I

Kirk: can, but can I jump in on what you just talked about too, because when, so when you grow up in the Midwest, so in other words no, I can do it. I, but I can do all this in five minutes. I’ve got, I see the time when you grow up in the Midwest, you actually see how this all comes together.

So like this weather, this impact on, on, on climate and farmers either always have too little or too much rain. It’s always too hot or too cold. Like it’s always hard for a farmer look at what happened in the Midwest to actually get that farm stuff to market. You can draw a map of the state of Iowa without using the political boundary lines, just by virtue of the roads, because roads were drawn every mile to actually bring product to market.

And so this whole progressive sensibility that we do better when we work together actually grew out of the Midwest. It grew out of the rural Midwest. And it’s one of the things that really breaks [00:20:00] my heart to see this kind of political art because the Iowa was blue and then purple announced decidedly red in my experience.

But this notion that people are. Being dislodged from this basic premise that when we work together, we can create better outcomes for everybody. It’s so viscerally true when you, again, when you grow up and you come from a place like Iowa, but with, but that notion has been dislodged. And I think it’s been dislodged largely because of the the communications and informational landscape we live in.

But my career arc has pretty, it’s simple ’cause I tend to hang around jobs, so I started in DC I was, I and the first day on my first ever job in DC I sent 100 faxes. And anybody who’s ever, they, go ahead. Go ahead.

Eric: Where did you work in DC

Kirk: So I was the I became, I started out as the lowly admin, but I became the policy director for a trade association called the Business Council for Sustainable Energy.

And back when we thought there was actually gonna be federal climate legislation and the president called Bill Clinton was going to could be be the author of that legislation. I worked at a trade association. That actually had some incredible access. Like one of the people that founded it ended [00:21:00] up becoming one of the early chief of staff workers at the Clinton White House.

If you’ve ever heard of a company called Enron or a guy named Ken Lay, he was my first, he was my first handshake in Washington because he was actually the first chairman I had his direct dial in my Rolodex. Yeah no. But again, as ugly as that is, it just speaks to this organizing principle that people get involved with, which is, Hey, let’s work the system, figure out how policy can intersect with my business and then do better.

And I have to say that was an interesting marriage because that was the natural gas industry working with the solar and energy efficiency industries to say, Hey, we can carve out big pieces of policy that are gonna be better for the world. And I think, natural gas has changed in terms of how it’s viewed as part of the clean energy equation.

But back then it was actually really important to try to bring the gas industry into those conversations. I left from there to California and I worked on renewable energy policy at the local level for a number of years. In the midst of that, California had its first energy crisis, so we saw all these math editorials go up that said the reason that the lights [00:22:00] were going out in California is because of its environmental laws.

Which just sounds every day in on X or Twitter today. Yeah. But yeah, total bullshit. Exactly. Completely right. But the subject of a coordinated campaign, and again, this is of course, this is back when mastered editorials mattered, and that was like. 30 masthead editorials went up the same day with the same at this point.

So that, that really hit me in my cumulative experience in dc just this notion around communications and how we do it and do it better or worse. And your buddy,

Eric: buddy, Ken Lay, had a lot to do with the fact that California had a problem getting energy to the grid. Correct.

Kirk: Ken Lay was the reason the lights went out in California and Ken Lay was the reason the lights went out for Enron.

That all that trading, all that deception, didn’t didn’t, there was some almost Greek level, moral Yeah. Stuff there. So then I, and then what? And then I jumped to communications group called Research Media. Ran that for 10 years, I think, and grew it.

Then I had a two-year-old daughter. Wait, so

Eric: Did you create tell me about, you jumped to Resource Media. How did that happen? And we have our [00:23:00] own kind of internist scene relationships with Resource Media.

Kirk: Yeah.

Eric: But go ahead tell me. Gimme a little more on that.

Kirk: Yeah.

It wasn’t Resource Media when I got there. So I was looking for an opportunity. This group called then Environmental Media Services West, had an office in San Francisco’s Presidio, which is where I was working. So IFI found this job opportunity. I came to this little group called Environmental Media Services West.

I found out in retrospect that I. They wanted to impress me for the interview. So when I came over, they bought a folding chair. They bought a folding table so they at least had a folding

Kirk  : table to sit up in the middle of

Kirk: their so sweet, right in the middle of their foreperson office. I remember I brought some of my friends from DC over to see me.

When I first got that job and I came into the office, every person looked at me like. I’m so sorry, Kirk. Your career’s taken such a terrible turn, and it was, and honestly, this is one of the things that we talk about the humble origins for everybody. Every one of these jobs that I’ve had has been the absolute humble origins.

Like I was the first, the business council is still around. I was the first employee, like some [00:24:00] of the programming that I launched the business council remains today. Back then in Environmental Media Services West, that office that I was hired for, the Center for Resource Solutions had a, had $30,000 in the bank when I got there.

It still exists today. The programming that we launched there still exists today. The Green Power Partnership program that I helped launch with the US Environmental Protection Agency is still a recognizing communities today. Like one of the towns is next door to me. I drive by a Green Power Partnership sign every day and I’m like, oh, actually I helped create that program.

That’s cool. And then. Environmental media services West, like the office that I was hired to serve, there were two offices at that time, was basically six months away from closing. Like it was like, and it was also a, it was a rat’s nest of dysfunction. There was really no board leadership.

It was still a fiscal agent of the Tide Center. There was stuff going on with the money that was a problem. And then and then the team was they were all frenemies of each other, not really collaborators, ’cause it, because it, and their conception of the work was, and we’ve talked about this before, they were a pure PR media group.

So they wanted you to call them, say, we have a report, [00:25:00] right? And pitch the press release. That was the business model. And then and the big conversation was okay, we hope that you call us to write and pitch the press release not one day before the port report’s due. Let’s see if we can get you to call us a week or two weeks before so we can do that.

And so the resource media arc, we changed the name and we actually got to that name because we had a. This is a great branding idea by the way. Get your team together. We got together for the first retreat of that group and we said, give us your best ideas for our name. But the the rule of this conversation is you can only say what you like.

You can’t say what you dislike. You can only say what you like. And so people just started throwing out ideas. And that scaffolding got us to actually, this is what we wanna call this place. Let’s call this place Resource Media. It works at a bunch of different levels and that kind of deep systems, deep organizational, deep sorting stuff out work helped set that group up, it still is around today, and set that group up for decades of sustained and [00:26:00] positive progress and the conception of that group now for what effective communications looks like.

It’s not we’ll pitch the report, it’s, we will help create and design from whole cloth these big campaigns that can actually move new ideas into. The information environment and secure major outcomes. So that’s how, okay. So go. I

Eric: was trying to get you to where you are today. Yeah. But I failed. So we’re gonna take a quick break and we write back with our very special but guest, Kirk Brown.

Eric  : You are listening to. Let’s Hear It, a podcast about foundation and non-profit communications hosted by Eric Brown and Kirk Brown. If you’re enjoying this episode, you may just be a rule breaker. Tune in to break fake rules, a new limited series podcast with Glen Gallic, CEO of the St. Stussy Foundation.

Hear from leaders in philanthropy, non-profits, government media, and more to learn about challenges they’ve overcome by breaking fake rules and which rules we should commit to breaking together. Check them out wherever you get your podcasts. [00:27:00]

Eric: And welcome back. We are here with Kirk Brown, and we’re trying to get him through his career so that we can get into the meat of what he’s doing right now.

Yeah. So let’s just pick up where we left off. You were at Resource Media.

Kirk (4): Yeah.

Eric: And then you hung out a shingle. You started your own thing.

Kirk: Yeah, I,

Eric: is that right?

Kirk: That’s right. I had a two, I had a 2-year-old. I was like, I’m not gonna spend 40% of my time on the road, visiting all these field offices.

So it’s me, it’s a couch, it’s a 13 inch laptop and it’s reach strategies. And and so for the last 12 years I’ve been running this growing practice and we really hone in on the clean energy equation. So we work with every kinda entity you can imagine to advance clean energy and with a specific focus around electric vehicles.

And it’s been interesting to watch electric vehicles move from, again, same thing when I first told colleagues that I was gonna work on electric vehicles, it sounded, it looked just like my parents when I told them I was gonna work on wind turbines, they, they looked at me, said, wait, what? We stopped using wind turbines to pump water a hundred years ago.

What do you, why did you doing wind turbines? So now there’s [00:28:00] massive wind tur, wind farms in Iowa, Texas, all over the country. Electric vehicles, same thing. The first time I talked to people about we’re gonna work on electric vehicles, they looked at me and said, what are you talking about? Like, when we got started there were like, I think fewer than a thousand in the country, and today there electric vehicles modern highway ready electric vehicles. There was the Chevy, there was the Chevy Volt Vias and Victory Volt. There was the Nissan Leaf, that’s it. And it was the raw

Eric: Ford. They had about a hundred of them.

Kirk: That’s right. I remember that. That’s right. That’s right.

And they were all coming outta California. So we had this ability to take this experience and we got started in that work. Actually. I was doing some work with a nonprofit and the CEO of Paramount pictures called and said, we actually, I just bought a Tesla. We’re gonna put a Tesla charger in our parking lot.

I wanna do a test drive, an electric car test drive in the Paramount Pictures parking lot. I said, yes. I did it for free. I flew down to h, I flew down to Hollywood. Speaking of out Los Angeles burning, I flew down to Hollywood. We were in the, we were in the parking lot of Paramount pictures on their parquet.

It was a beautiful, it’s like all this historic place like you, [00:29:00] this date of Iowa. I was like, I’ve made it. I’ve doing work in Hollywood. I, wait a minute. Yeah. Wait

Eric: a minute. Yeah. The CEO of Paramount pictures.

Kirk  : Yeah.

Eric: You had his ear and you didn’t say, Hey, look, I have this friend who’s a, has been former washed up child actor.

You should give him a job.

Kirk  : I know. I’m yeah, Kirk I don’t, the only pitch I should, I gotta find

Eric: a new cohost. I’m just mad at you.

Kirk: It’s terrible. I’m so bad. I, the, one of the, one of the producers, I think, on one of the Mission Impossible, I can’t remember which one, flowed through this song, ah, flowed through this bit.

I’ve

Eric: been great on that. Simon PG sucks. I could have been perfect. And

Kirk: I tried to, shit, I tried to pitch a story about electrification of this person’s eyes glazed over within five seconds. It was really painful. But here I am on the park a of this h in Hollywood and all these people flowing through and getting in these cars.

It was so cool, so fun. I forgot it was a beautiful 80 degree clear day in Hollywood. I forgot sunscreen. I got bla badly birds. Imagine. Yes. I can

Kirk (4): believe, yes, you can believe

Kirk: melanin challenged, but I was like, this is incredible. Transportation has been the biggest issue. On [00:30:00] climate car companies have been the biggest issue.

This is gonna be the end run. We’re gonna be able to introduce people to these cars and this is gonna really help us advance this. And then the other piece, and this is so interesting, watching the social media landscape. Just, I, it’s funny, I went on X the other day, Eric, and I’m like, this reminds me of MySpace when it was just dominated by porn.

I’m like this channel. There’s, I know there’s still voices on X that you can find, but this channel as a whole has just turned into a massive mouthpiece for insanity. But but I realized 12 years ago we were, this was when the social media zig was happening. Everyone was like, wow, social media campaigns at scale, they’re measurable.

You can find everybody everywhere. And we were like, we are gonna do the experiential zag. Everyone’s doing social media, Zig, we are gonna do the experiential zag because you cannot embrace this new technology if you don’t actually get your hands on it. You have to have the experience of it.

And then one of the things that happens when we do experiential. It stops being us telling you how important something [00:31:00] is. We just put something in your hands and then you tell us how important it is. And when we create that experiential moment, we lay claim to parts of your mind that you that you we’re with you for the rest of your life because you’ve had the first person experience of how great this stuff is.

So we’ve been doing that work around experience for 12 years and it’s been really great.

Eric: So Kirk, you’ve been doing the Iowa caucuses for electric cars

Kirk: and can I tell you something? Yes. And can I, so can I tell you something? As a community, we need to embrace the Iowa Caucus model of communications, and it’s never been more desperately needed.

And it’s funny I keep wanting to do this writing and so this is one of the reasons nobody ever knows about me is that one of the things I learned at research media, and I really value it, is we do our best work when we’re in the background and nobody knows what we’re doing. And, and so people see outcomes, but they don’t.

If they don’t put our name on it. And so that’s been a big hallmark for me my whole career. In fact, actually, Eric, I got to know you at the Hewlett Foundation and so what did you guys think about the resource media model? Because, ’cause we [00:32:00] got started having these kinds of conversations when I would like every now and then tackle you at your office and we would just go for an hour, which was always like, great for me.

But I always wondered what is this like for this poor guy at the Healt Foundation this poor nonprofit person coming in, but what did you think about what you were seeing at Resource Media when we were turning it around?

Eric: Folks out there being tackled by Kirk Brown is no joke.

He’s a big dude, so no. This notion of research media, I loved it. I thought it was amazing because, so you have all these grantees out there and they need communications help. They’re often not staffed up to do that, right? Funders won’t fund them to do communications. But if you have this organization that will come in and serve them, help them, support them and.

Hold them up, give them the wherewithal to be able to do a campaign or to engage or to do the kinds of strategic thinking that they’d never feel like they have the time to do. That’s like a miracle. So I always thought that model was spectacular. And especially because resource media didn’t come in and try to [00:33:00] bigfoot the whole thing, right?

You listened, you supported, and then you would go back to your, go back to your work when it was over. And you also saw across the organizations that were working in a particular field, you saw across the trees. And so you can knit together ideas, concepts, narratives, whatever. So that, I think that model continues to be a really great model.

So if you’re a funder out there and you have a bunch of grantees working in a particular area, think about how you can use communications either internally or externally to support this group. And I know a lot of people are doing that, but the way Resource media did it, I thought was. Really interesting.

The other thing I think in my own mind was that you had the authority to go and identify Ooh, your grantee over here is doing really interesting work. Let’s go and do some work with them, and you would, partner with the foundation on this. And so there was a coordinated strategy, which I thought w by, led by people who were very close to the work that is you and the grantees [00:34:00] working in partnership.

So that’s what I perceive that model to be, and I think that it’s a fascinating one and that folks should continue to con consider doing it if you’re a funder.

Kirk: No, it’s exactly right. And there’s so much counterintuitive stuff you have to do to make a model like that work. Like EMS West, the group that that we, screw out of environmental Media services West that was initially conceived by Char. And I think we, our whole community owes Arley and their executive

Eric: director was

Kirk: Chris Dei. Chris, our whole community owes that thought process a huge step because I agree there’s a bunch of people now that are working more in this kind of, campaign oriented way around communications.

But it all got started when Chris and Ali were like trying to do News of the Day work opposing, anti-environmental thinking coming outta Washington, DC serving, po the DC policy belt groups. So what the evolution that happened at Research Media. And I think to me, this is one of the things we’re seeing very back to us in a very pernicious way now as we watch the social media landscape change.

The evolution went from politics of the day, so let’s react to whatever the policy people are doing. So research Me had kicked that over a little bit and said, [00:35:00] no, actually, let’s. Let’s work with this Constellation organization. So organization is gonna be the unit to measure. Let’s help organizations communicate more effectively.

Then it beca became campaigns like, let’s work with campaigns to help campaigns work effectively. So that’s a constellation of organizations. The real get is when you start working at the level of ideas, what are the ideas that we need to move forward and how do we enlist whatever it takes to actually advance certain ideas?

And I would tell you that was like some of the most interesting, but also difficult work we did at Research Media. And we continue to do at reach strategies. How do you advance basic ideas? And that requires you to enlist every kind of beg, borrow and steal every kind of funder, every kind of voice, every kind of messenger, every kind of piece of of information you can get about where this stuff is living in the land, in the media landscape.

And one of the observations I would make about our field versus the opposition we see is I think we’re doing good work and like we had to. Really focus on what was truthful and what was fair and accurate when we did our work. We do this today at Reach. We did it research media because it’s cheaper, to be honest.

It takes a lot of money to lie. It’s very expensive to lie. [00:36:00] It’s

Eric: That’s good to know.

Kirk: Thank you. Yeah, so since we never had a lot of money, we always had to be very honest, but we’re still being out foxed, I think, in this communications landscape. And I think it’s funny, it’s like progressive communications in some respects has never been better.

I think we would say there’s never been more resources and yet our overall information environment has never been worse, I would say. And that disconnect is a really interesting thing to think about. And for me, one of the words I wanted to just make sure we talked about of this podcast is McGuffin.

McGuff McGuffin. We’ve used

Eric: McGuffin before.

Kirk: I know, but it’s so important because ’cause like we are, using old school ideas. This is Charlie Brown kicking the football, and the football gets pulled back every single time. Like our entire information landscape is dominated by these McGuffin ideas that actually have deep salience.

They get us emotional, they get us filled with dopamine, they get us, but they actually cloud, they create, clouds over what’s actually happening and what’s really at risk when we’re going through these policy, political, whatever processes. And I, Kirk,

Eric: For our non [00:37:00] Hitchcock fans, can you just explain, you’re the actor, definit actor.

You

Kirk  : gotta say what it is. Could you say it better? You’re the trained actor. You’re the guy from Hollywood here. You gotta talk about it.

Eric: Alright, so I the McGuffin as I understand it, is basically the red herring. It’s the thing that, a plot point or a something that, that moves the action forward.

It’s the thing that, that distracts. You from what’s going on behind the scenes? A

Kirk: keyword there is distract I, that, that works for me. Works for me. Okay. The keyword is distract. And what’s difficult about this conversation is that these distracting things that are put forward, it’s not like they aren’t rooted in real human experience where people suffer as a result of these conversations.

So it’s, so when I say that these things are distracting, it doesn’t mean that what’s at risk or what’s being focused on isn’t, isn’t causing real pain for people. But they’re not the real conversation. They’re not the real thing that’s at risk. And I think as a community, we have, I, it appears to be, we are almost completely defenseless against this strategy because it just keeps being rolled out again and again to worse and worse effect.

And we have an entire [00:38:00] progressive and positive change movement, communications, machinery built up around let’s advance the facts in the most salient way. Let’s construct narratives. Let’s do the deep work. Let’s really build bridges and create equity and. And I couldn’t applaud that more.

I love that work. We do that work. It’s what gets us all really excited. And yet it, it’s funny it makes me feel about, the real politic versus the old politic when things shifted before World War. I like, like there’s a real politic thing happening to us in the information landscape where all of our channels, all of our tools, all of our systems are being clouded by this.

They’re just less, they’re less useful than they used to be. And go ahead.

Eric: Yeah. So we’re gonna, we can have this conversation for the rest of our lives, but I still wanna finish this interview. There you go. And we will address these questions over the course of Yes. Our time.

But so I also wanna ask you about recharge America.

Kirk  : Okay. Yes.

Eric: This is this other crazy idea that you had. Yeah. So you’re running a, you’re running a firm, you’ve got employees, you’ve got [00:39:00] whatever, salaries to pay and all this other stuff. And then you get another crazy Kirk Brown wild hair and start to pursue that.

Tell me about what is this Recharge America thing and what are you doing?

Kirk: Yeah once you’re, you get this public interest bug, you can’t, I can’t leave it. So there’s a public interest that drives everything we do. And one of the things we saw with our work with reach and working with all these actors around, what do you what does it take to actually clean up economies and clean up communities and get the dirty stuff out and the clean stuff in, and trans change transportation ’cause you’re using electricity and all that stuff.

You need deep community engagement and involvement. And so what Recharge America is about is a systematic process of going community by community. It’s the Iowa Caucus model of change. There you go. Community by community you bring together the right folks. It’s the economic development people, the higher education people, the people that have a real stake in the success of a community.

You ask the question, what is it gonna take for you to win [00:40:00] here as a result of this change that’s coming? And how can we provide support and resources so that you win here? That this change helps achieve outcomes here. That you create workforce pipelines, that you have places for your kids to go for jobs that are high quality for the foreseeable future that you attract economic opportunity instead of seeing it go far away.

And that approach to the work where you come in it’s what you were talking about with resource media. Let’s ask a question, listen deeply, and then provide resources so people can thrive and win has been so powerful. We’ve seen it roll out across community after community. If these are places, when you look at them from a political lens, you’d say, wow, these are, these places are 30 or 40 points red.

Like they, these are not Blue Islands living in red seas. No. These are oftentimes rural lack of little local capacity areas that are desperate for this kind of systematic support. How do we become part of this big technological change so that we can win here? So recharge and you’re saying

Eric: winning on electric vehicles and the clean electric economy?

Correct.

Kirk: And yes. [00:41:00] So win on the technology adoption and then all the benefits that brings, and one of the things that the electrification field, I think, fails to talk about enough is that when we electrify stuff, we unleash tons of money that can be used locally that now is going someplace else.

Like when you use electric electricity to power something that’s clean. You drive those dollars local, when you use a fossil fuel to power something, those dollars are going someplace far away. And actually you hope they’re going someplace far away. Otherwise you’ve got a fracking, rig right in your backyard, which you may or may not want.

I know what so that’s recharge America. And that work has been powerful. And it’s funny, it’s, I wish it was operating more at scale because, one of the big things for the Biden administration, they unlocked, they unleashed more resources to support the stuff we care about in terms of clean energy, community development, economic opportunity, fair and equitable access to this new technology transition.

They unleashed more resources to support that outcome than any administration in history. And one of their complaints was, we’re driving all these dollars to communities. We’re not getting any credit [00:42:00] for it. Why? From where I sit, if you don’t have that infrastructure for the community, that community container ready to receive that in a broad way, it’s literally like pouring a cup of water on a sandy beach.

You just watch that money disappear and yes it might create change over time. There’s seeds in there, something’s gonna grow and bloom, but if there’s not a container to hold it, that money, those dollars don’t actually land anywhere. They don’t land in the public consciousness.

And we watch some efforts, late in the Biden administration to frantically try to address that. And let’s put more of a spotlight. The thing I would say from a Recharge America standpoint, we wanna do this building block work community by community. This is not a six month investment.

This is not a three month investment. This is a multi-year investment. Let’s become partners in communities and help them develop thoughtful strategies that work for them so that when we’re trying to drive these resources to these communities, there’s a legitimate opportunity to help them grow.

And that, and we’re also honestly partners. We’re not just astroturfing in saying, Hey, give us a press release. It’s we’re actually no building [00:43:00] real relationships. So that’s what recharge American’s about.

Eric: Yeah. And for folks out there who are interested in this model, you’re building you’re building community org, you’re doing community organizing Yeah.

In purple to reddish states around clean energy and electric vehicles and other things like that. And those folks are actually really buying into it. Yeah. So it is this extraordinary model and they’re buying into it because it matters and it’s real. It’s not because they’ve been talked into something that they don’t want real for them.

Real for them. Yeah.

Kirk (3): Yeah.

Eric: So that’s just this a really great model. And I even at full disclosure, I was roped into yet another one, Kirk Brown scheme. So I sit on your board but only did it because I actually believe in it.

Kirk (4): Yeah.

Eric: But not like this podcast, which is, I’ve said to anybody who will listen is a labor of hate.

Kirk: So. Can I give you one anecdote outta the work too? Oh, you gimme one anecdote, then we gotta have to wrap it up. We gotta, I know.

Eric: Got things to do. You’re on

Kirk: the clock. I know. So. Great illustration how this works. We’re in a rural community that’s got a a state school in it and we’re invited to do a [00:44:00] test drive event, electric vehicle test drive event in this community.

This community has already been home to one of the largest EV test drives in that state’s history because the same institution did something like this a couple years prior. This is right after Covid, so this is gonna be a smaller event and we get student interns always to help with these events, right?

Because we wanna give, we want students to participate. We’re in rural Minnesota and the conception that people have of what that means. I’m not even gonna try to paint the picture, but I can just know what images jump in your mind. The second rural Minnesota and I look across our group of student interns, and because of the time of year we were doing this, every single one of them was observing Ramadan.

Every single one of them was fasting while they were doing their work during that day. And I was thinking to myself, this is probably the most diverse collection of people that’s ever come together for an EV test drive, certainly in this community, but maybe in the state, maybe in the country. It’s happening because we’re willing to do this work in under any circumstances.

And we’re willing to do this work in a way where we come to communities and say, what’s gonna be a win for you? What’s gonna matter for you with this? Not us sitting on our little tower telling you where to go, but we’re coming into town saying, where do you wanna be? What’s gonna, what’s gonna be helpful for you?

So the [00:45:00] opportunities we have for building real bridges with communities far and wide, and again, coming back, addressing the challenges in our information landscape and actually building real lasting change from the ground up. It’s never been greater in our country. And I think it’s just, we all have to figure out ways to invest in that work.

And that’s recharge. America’s our version of that. So now I’ll let you get to your thing.

Eric: Here you go folks. You get a sense of how the place affects a person. How communications isn’t just its own thing, but it actually leads to real work. And it is also tied into the fact that climate and.

Economies and people’s lives are inextricably linked. They’re not a concept or a theory about something that’s gonna happen long into the future. But something that’s happening really, right now. And given the context of today, opening up my paper and seeing flames on the front page of the New York Times,

Kirk (4): yeah.

Eric: It, it has a meaningful effect on people’s lives and we [00:46:00] have to start planning for the future ’cause it’s not getting any better. But we have to figure out these kinds of solutions and that your career, Kirk is dedicated to that. And for this, I applaud you Kirk Brown. Thank you so much for coming on to Let’s hear it.

Kirk  : Thank you. So you do this very well. I could see the magic. It’s been nice to be part of the magic.

Eric: Thank you Kirk.

Kirk  : And we’re back. So

Kirk: this is this is our post-mortem that man,

Eric: otherwise known of course, affectionately as the blah blah.

Kirk: Yeah, it’s hard to know what to do with this one because I was part of the interview.

And so I will say people need to get a little glimpse of the, there’s a lot of work that goes into these, each of these episodes. And like Eric does all of his homework, all of his like interviewing, he gets somebody together, gets some talking that gets put together into a cut. Then I get to listen to it before we do the blah blah, I get to do some reflection.

I get to, we have a multi-hundred page guest notes document that tracks all of the kind of process, the questions

Kirk  : that I want to go into. Eric always cheats [00:47:00] the process ’cause he’ll open that guest notes document before we start our blah blah. So he knows the stuff that I wanna talk about before we even get there.

So we’re helpful. We’re flying blind right now. ’cause there’s no guest notes document. There’s no no. So how do we even do this? I don’t even know how to, I don’t even know how to get into this.

Eric: Usually what you do is you interview me about the, how the interview went and then you bring up all the things that the guests, the clever things that the guests said.

Yeah. And you reflect on it. That’s what happens.

Kirk  : So then I’ll do that to myself, which is great. I get to. Do this weird kind of reflection myself. But

Kirk: Eric, one of the things I really liked that you guys talked about was this piece around how we do community by community engagement on the topics that we care about.

And we let communities guide us in that conversation. We don’t come to them and say, here’s all this stuff we know and we’re gonna tell you what’s right, but actually letting communities be the lead dance partner in that conversation. And you talked about Recharge America, which man, that sounds like an amazing enterprise of, geez, unified resources.

I’d certainly invested it, but very interesting. [00:48:00] Yeah.

Eric: Very interesting organization with a with a extremely strong board except for one member

Kirk: who, but do you think it’s possible for our community, which, which at times people have said to me, it’s harder to come up with good ideas than it is money.

There’s more money than ideas in our community at times. Do you think it’s possible for our community to actually. Double down on community level engagement at scale on the topics we care about all across the country.

Eric: Okay, so here’s, that’s a good question, Kirk, and I think that given that so many of our listeners are work at foundations, or many of whom actually run foundations, one of the things that foundations are always talking about is, how do I get information?

How do I actually hear what people need?

Kirk (4): How

Eric: do we listen? That sort of thing. And funding this kind of community-based work is one way to do that.

Kirk (4): So

Eric: you fund these organizations that are working in communities that are listening to what their neighbors are having to say, and [00:49:00] they’re being responsive to people’s needs as opposed to, and frankly, when I was at the Hela Foundation, this concept of strategic philanthropy, which is you identify your goals, you figure out what organizations are working on those things, you fund them to do a very specific thing, and you measure.

Evaluate based on your goals going in, I think is we are seeing the challenge with that strategy, which may work in some areas, but it doesn’t allow for the stuff that you didn’t know.

Kirk: Yeah.

Eric: And I think that’s where this model that you are doing, which is you go into a community, you find out what they need.

What you didn’t mention in the interview, and I just because I have inside knowledge, is that you also work with a local community funder. Yes.

Whether it’s a community foundation or a family foundation.

Kirk (4): Yeah.

Eric: Somebody who lives and works and breathes that community’s interests is such an important component of this.

So if you’re a national funder, I think on almost any issue [00:50:00] that you work on, who is your local funding partner? Who they have different levels of intelligence, there are different levels of engagement and. And contacts and things like that because you really wanna make these issues local. You don’t wanna make it seem like the Sierra Club, no offense to the Sierra Club or anybody else, NRDC or any of these other kind of large organizations who are centered in Washington or San Francisco or someplace not in your community, is gonna come in and do a whole bunch of work.

And, which is why partnerships and these kind of we do have to create these nodes of engagement and trust.

Kirk (3): Yeah.

Eric: Be in order to get anything done to be perfectly honest. And so I, I think that this model that you’ve got is really important. And yes, it may be supplemented or supported by national narratives around things as well, but without knowing your neighbor and understanding what they care about and working together [00:51:00] with them, even if you don’t agree on everything.

I’m not sure how we overcome the disinformation, how we overcome the whatever. Yeah. The tech issue, the ai, the, you name it. The stuff that you don’t, can’t feel in touch.

Kirk: Yeah.

Eric: And I think this notion that, we have to engage on things that you can feel in touch

Kirk: Yeah.

Is really important. And as you were talking about that too, Eric, and this is why I literally love having this conversation with you. I always love that heal foundation. I love hearing you do it with your interviews, but this blah, blah, blah, we get a chance to come up with new thoughts too.

That, the thing that it makes me think about when you talk about strategic philanthropy in particular, and let’s be fair, we’re not criticizing strategic philanthropy. No. In fact we love that you take big swings, you need big ideas. And strategic philanthropy is one of those concepts, but this notion of what gets measured matters comes to for me in this, because, with when strategic philanthropy, and we’ve actually had this experience talking about recharge America.

If you’re attacking carbon, if carbon is the problem you’re trying to [00:52:00] solve, then so your strategy drives you to the places where the most carbon lives. And so you get really thoughtful about how do you change carbon? All that kind of stuff. What can get left on the side of the road? And I think this is the sort of, how do we measure this thing?

We’re talking when we’re talking about community engagement is what is the metric we’re trying to shift? What is the measure that we’re trying to move and how does changing that measure create enabling conditions for all these things that we want to see happen, including reductions in carbon and other things like that.

And so I think it, it puts a good focus on this notion of to help communicate to our funders why this work matters. It actually, and you’ve said this to me many times, it puts a it really puts the onus on us to come up with a way. To characterize that work so that we can help funders re release resources in a way that they’re gonna, they’re gonna feel like is a prudent and responsible way to leverage their very precious dollars.

And, we talk about community engagement. I think that that almost drains this topic of the kind of things we’re, because you point out, like I didn’t mention Yeah. Crucial part of our strategy is you work with the local philanthropic partner because they can [00:53:00] actually assemble some of the leadership you need to advance things.

What is that measure? What are we talking about there? Because it’s not just the dollars we’re talking about their ability to knit relationships through an entire community. No, I think that’s a great thing. So can I give you one more thing? Oh, go ahead. Yeah. But

Eric: I wanna interject one thing Yeah.

And then we have to, then we have to let people go. I know. ’cause they have real busy lives. They have because they’ve already finished walking the dog or their workout is work. Exactly. But the, I think that the organizing principle here is creating political constituencies for good stuff.

Yeah.

Kirk (4): Yeah.

Eric: And it, if you cannot come in, parachute in, do some campaign and leave. Without creating political constituencies to protect, build, come up with new ideas and succeed over time.

Kirk (4): Yeah.

Eric: And I think that’s where, that’s what you’re doing at Recharge, and that’s what, really smart campaigns do is or funders or strategies, you name it.

How do we create an enduring constituency that will protect this work and create and come up with new ideas for better things in the future [00:54:00] over time that endures, and that’s to my mind, the most important thing you can do in any issue anywhere Anyway.

Kirk: Couldn’t agree more. So Eric, great work, great guest.

Once again, salient, probing.

Eric: Great depth of conversation. Scintillating. What a smart guy. That, that, that guest of mine was

Kirk: long-winded. Long-winded, long-winded. Long-winded, but loves to hear self-talk, it happens to the best of us. But that’s great. So I will say, I think that we touched on some stuff in our conversation, both the interview and after too, and this is what I love about this podcast, but the themes that we can draw, so this notion of comm, everything’s a communications campaign.

How do we pull that forward? How do we address the ai, the bots the disinformation misinformation? What’s, what tactics are out there? And then the work that you’ve been doing for years, Eric, around bridging, I feel is central to this too. How do we help people outta these bubbles where they feel isolated, alone attacked by all this upset that’s out there and actually bridge them to a sense [00:55:00] of a deeper connection with others and community that’s driving towards positive progress.

Those are the themes I hope we can keep hitting on with the podcast. And I really do appreciate your willingness to do all the work around here, because when I look back at the legacy of conversations over the past six years, I think it’s a, it’s an, it’s just a. An enduring track record of evidence about all of the work that great people have been doing to make the world a better place.

And I think that’s, those are voices we need to hear from. So thank you. Thank you for all the work you’ve done on this, Eric.

Eric: Whatever I will say we totally and utterly buried the lead, which is this Marks the beginning of our seventh season.

Kirk: There it is.

Eric: Seven Seasons. Lucky seven. Yay. Lucky seven.

Kirk: Lucky seven. And more to talk about. More to talk about. More to talk about. Yeah.

Eric: Thank you Kirk, and thanks to our sponsors and thank you to our listeners who are, if you’re still here thank you. And if you’re new to this thing, welcome.

Kirk: It keeps getting better. Thanks everybody. We’ll see you next time and let’s hear it.[00:56:00]

Okay, everybody. That’s it for this episode. Please let us know if you have any thoughts about what you heard today or people we should have on this show, and that definitely includes yourself. And we’d like to thank John Ali, the tuneful and inspiring composer of our theme music,

Eric  : our sponsor,

Kirk: the Lumina Foundation, and please check out Lumina’s terrific podcast, today’s students tomorrow’s talent, and you can find that@luminafoundation.org.

We

Eric  : certainly thank today’s guest, and of course, all

Kirk: of you, and most importantly, thank you, Mr. Brown.

Eric: Oh no. Thank you, Mr. Brown.

Kirk: Okay, everybody

Kirk  : tell next time.