Hello and welcome to the profit meets Impact podcast, where we explore the intersection of doing well and doing good in the world. I'm your host, Morgan Bailey, and I'm excited to bring you the wisdom of entrepreneurs and thought leaders that are using business to create sustainable and meaningful change across the globe. Well, it is a pleasure and an honor to have Austin Choi Fitzpatrick on the show today. Awesome. Beyond being a friend and an amazing guy, he is a California based author, artist and educator. He is professor at the University of San Diego's Crock School of Peace Studies, where he is also the director of their Master of Arts program in Social Innovation. He is also the co chair of the Gilder Lehrman Center's working group on the Future of Slavery and Emancipation at Yale University. He installs large scale sculptures with art builds which I've seen and are amazing.

He writes books about culture and politics, including the most recently wicked Problems. And wow, you have such a resume. I'm kind of out of breath saying that all. Austin, man, it is such a, such a pleasure to be having you in this conversation.

I'm so excited to be here. I think we're going to talk about all sorts of fun and cool things. It's good to see you. Good to be here. Thank you.

I know, Austin, if anything's true between us, our conversations are always interesting and always meandering.

I love it.

So I think where we started this conversation, or one of the reasons why I want to chat with you is around this concept of social innovation. Obviously, on this podcast, a lot of what I focus on is how businesses use social innovation to drive profit and drive change. And I know you're tackling a part of social innovation as well. It's really something that's important to you. Obviously, it's a piece of your work, but I wanted to pause really quickly on that piece and really try to understand. You have such a unique background, just a lot of varied perspective to understand what are all the experiences you had that really led you up to the point to see social innovation as something that's important in other world needs?

Yeah, it's a great question. I wouldn't ordinarily cast myself if you asked me to draw a circle around the work that I do. Your intro, your generous intro, sort of showed this range of things that have captured my attention. If you had to, if you asked AI to describe what all that is, I don't know if chat GPT would say, oh, that is social innovation. And so in some ways, I feel like I've backed into this. This field and where I've come from, to answer your question, is a deep curiosity about not just what's wrong with the world, but what's right in the world and what works between humans and where it is that we together can harness creativity in order to create new systems, new norms, new institutions, in order to make the world a better place. And I feel like I come from the human rights world. I come from the social movements world.

And both of those two areas, social movements and human rights, are both really organized around problems and trying to address problems as they're happening, like, to stop harms from happening. And I've done work, written a couple of books in that space, and wanted to change gears and start asking questions about creativity, innovation, about more generative approaches to working together, not just to block the pipeline or stop the law or pass the law or recognize new rights and identities, but also to proactively construct the kinds of, again, like institutions, norms, and ideas that look more like the world we'd like to live in. And so that I think I kind of stumbled backward from there in those interests into something that we would now call, or I would now describe as social innovation.

And that's a. I'm appreciating that shift. I also appreciate a lot of the time that you spent researching, I guess, some of the darker sides of the world. And I can see this polar side of focus so much on the problems. What are some of the solutions? I want to explore a little bit about your background, because one of the things that you have studied is slavery and indentured servitude. And we think about the economy. That's obviously a really big piece that has. That it is driven by the economic engine.

Right. So I'm kind of curious, you know, through that process, like, what, what are some of the things that you've learned about the economy? Where are some of the insights that you gleaned that maybe started to push you more towards the solution side, but just. Just kind of curious to hear a little bit about that experience.

Yeah, I didn't. I didn't. It's funny you say that, because, you know, I didn't know if this would come up, but my first couple of projects run slavery, trafficking bonded labor. I wrote this book called what Slaveholders think, which is an attempt to. And this is the research I was doing when we first met each other many moons ago. And I was trying to figure out, what is it that people tell themselves? How do people rationalize socially acceptable, but sort of like, but fundamentally illegal forms of exploitation. And so it's one thing if you, if I break into a store and I steal something, I kind of know that I should cover my tracks and avoid the CCTV because what I'm doing is wrong. The question in my mind was, what happens when people do things that are illegal but not culturally unacceptable? So it's like looking at bonded labor in rural India, something that has been acceptable for time immemorial, but is now no longer accepted and social movements are trying to resist.

And this led me to this question about how it is that our systems, social systems, but also our economic systems, create pockets of exploitation, these places where nobody bothers to sweep in the corners, either because we just don't ever get around to it, or because we have systems that are organized around a strategic lack of curiosity about where it is that exploitation is actually happening. And so to bounce back to the answer I gave a moment ago about social innovation, there's all of this kind of these next steps that follow from a study of slavery and exploitation. Like, okay, we need to tackle public policy issues, we need to tackle gainful employment issues, we need better enforcement mechanisms around the laws that actually exist. But at some point, and that's all very good and important work, like, full stop, new paragraph. But at some point, we've got to ask, what are the proactive visions we have for directing individuals, organizations, societies, industries in that is more emancipatory and life giving? And so these are two sides of a coin. If we have exploitation happening, if we have a failure to thrive happening, human rights violations happening, we can focus on stopping those from happening, arresting them in their tracks. And we should also be focusing on really positive alternatives that can capture our vision in our sort of imagination. I don't know if that's not a terribly clear answer, but it wasn't a terribly clear process, I think, either, going from the study of problems to this exploration and examination of solutions.

Yeah, I mean, and I feel like in many ways, I mean, we're still in the midst of it. I mean, it's something that is constantly evolving. And I think we're in a very dynamic part of the world right now. And so I'm curious to dig into something around this. So something, as you were talking, came to mind. One of my favorite quotes at Buckminster Fuller quote, which is, I may butcher a little bit, something like, if you want to change a system, like make it obsolete, like make the desire, make the undesired state obsolete. Right? So I see we're shifting, like economically, you know, globally, we're shifting economically, you know, when it comes to equality, when it comes to environmental, social factors.

Right.

So how much of this shift is, is sort of on the forcing end of, like, we need to be doing this versus on the generative end of like, well, we're just going to make that other system obsolete? And where does social innovation come in there?

Yeah, I feel like the, I feel like one of the questions we need to ask ourselves at the, at the largest level is whether or not we are willing to tolerate systems that have negative externalities. And if we have, if we build and create systems that come at the expense and are only possible at the expense of the environment or at the expense of marginalized people or groups or communities, that's the impasse I think we're approaching. That's a big decision moment I think we have ahead of us, which is to ask, are these systems worth pursuing and continuing to invest in if they have negative externalities, or do we want to reorganize our systems around flourishing both for the planet and for people in a way that also allows economic systems to continue in a way that benefits many, many stakeholders? And I think we have current systems that benefit more stakeholders than earlier systems did, but they have these negative externalities, and this isn't my area of expertise. The business side of things isn't my area of expertise, but that's where in the social innovation space and in the sort of social entrepreneurship space, I think there's a whole lot of additional work that remains to be done on is trying to find those, those systems that allow for, I don't know, this is like triple and quadruple bottom line sort of stuff, but they find these systems that are virtuous with regard to who will they serve while fundamentally addressing or eliminating these negative externalities. And I think about people and planet because, you know, I'm a human rights guy and I think of social movements around, around the environment, but there's others, there's others that we should be interested.

In as well, but absolutely. And many that we're completely unaware of as of yet. Okay, so looking forward. And when we talk about, like the social innovation piece, because one thing I've noticed is even when I look five to ten years back, the demand around social innovation, even a lot of the terms around social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, they were known among some circles, but over the past, for the past five years, it's really started to explode. So I'm kind of curious, what are you seeing in terms of the social innovation space as to, like, where is that headed. And how are you seeing that demand changing?

Yeah, I'm in my forties and when I was coming up, you know, 20 years ago or so, they're only hand. If you wanted to do good in the world, you want to make a difference. There are these handful of like major institutions that you could, you know, you could go and work for the government or you could go and work for a well regarded nonprofit and there were like ten of them. I'm exaggerating, but there's like, there's only so many places one could actually go and, and serve. And serve is probably the best verb for it because you're actually recognizing, I'm going to step out from what's normally established in terms of, I guess you could be a lawyer, but then you'd be an environmental lawyer and, you know, you get paid less and you know that there's sort of these alternate tracks that only had a handful of, I don't know, modalities or options. That world has changed. I feel like the number of career paths one can choose if one is wanting to make a difference in the world is nearly, I don't want to say unlimited, but I was talking to a friend of mine the other day and they're doing work on sort of democratizing the process around space governance. So that's what he does.

Right? And then I have students come through a class like, you know what I want to do? I want to fundamentally alter the way that the cosmetics industry tests on animals. I have another student that comes along and says, I want to fundamentally address the way the cosmetic industry markets to young women. Another, it is just all. So what did I just say? I was talking about space exploration, the health and beauty industry. Those are not 2025 years ago, the sorts of careers that somebody who wanted to go into, human rights or social change, et cetera, could have then said, well, I'm going to go get a degree in that, right? So I feel like there's just been this incredible efflorescence of creativity around what people can imagine, but then also what our institutions can handle in terms of what they think is worth doing as an institution. And so all of a sudden you have corporations, some corporations doing greenwashing, and there's bad actors out there, actors who are doing good things for bad reasons, but that's fine. There's always noise in the system. But we're in a world where there are just more paths and opportunities to make social change than there have ever been before.

And that's been, I think I'm getting my way around to the answer to your roundabout way. To answer your question, that's been a huge change, and I love it because I'm increasingly at this point where when I'm talking to especially students who come through a graduate program, I'm not saying, well, here are the five places you can work if you want to make a difference. It's much more like, well, what are you passionate about and what sort of resources can we put? Can we wrap around this passion of yours? And then when you start having those sorts of conversations, the places they can actually make an impact are much more extensive than they were in the past. I'm not sure if that answers the question, but that's one of the most exciting things I've seen over the last, you know, couple of decades.

Yeah. Yeah. No, absolutely. And as you were thinking, I'm obviously thinking through a lot of the individuals I've been working with recently on such an amazing, just really interesting topics. And, and I think it's, you know, we're kind of at a really interesting nexus in time where there are large social, environmental challenges, large political challenges. There's also great opportunity. We have. We have amazing technology, like what somebody can do from their home in terms of creating a business, creating content, creating messaging, reaching the world is unparalleled to where we were just a couple decades ago.

Right. So the reach that people can have. And I think that's also led to a level of empowerment, like, unseen in many ways that an individual, and particularly just recently, somebody I was having on my show just a little while ago, he's creating a business to invest in solar, and he and a co founder were able to build this business using technology at their fingertips decades beyond probably what they would have been able to do if they were from a different generation. Just like the ability to do things quickly and to make an impact quickly, I think it's really kind of an empowering. Just feel. It feels really empowering. Right. Like, the ability is out there now.

It's also masked with, like, you know, there's some. Some large challenges, and I think there's a large part of the population, too, that is struggling with. With the weight of the challenges that we're currently facing. But I think we are seeing, particularly in the younger generation, like a level of empowerment and ability to get things done that we haven't seen before. And so from your perspective through your time as a professor, are you starting to see how, are you starting to see that tide shift?

Yeah, this is a great question. I feel like there's two different I'm sort of a simple minded person, or I like really simple tools, analytical tools, for thinking about things. But I tend to often come back to this difference between structure and agency, or the relationship between structure and agency. And a lot of what my last answer just emphasized, and the point you're making right now, very correctly, is that there's way more room for agency. There's just, there's the tools are available, a sense of possibility is present, and then what people end up doing is creating new things and envisioning new things and more paths available to students than ever before. This sort of thing. The question is whether in my mind, at the really macro level, it's a sort of like world historic timescale level, is whether or not we are going to be able to harness all of that efflorescence of agency in order to bend the arc or pick your metaphor on really systemic issues. So can our creativity end up outrunning climate change, or are we going to be able to is there an innovation solution, a collapse solution, or some other sort of outcome around climate or transition to sort of green economies, et cetera, geopolitics, or this huge and looming error term, or unknown, rather? And it's great that we have like increased levels of autonomy and agency within a handful of places, but we also have rise of authoritarian and democratic decline that are changing the landscape.

And then this is all happening at the same time as we're in the science and technology space playing and tinkering with all sorts of stuff we don't really, we're not able to see around the corner on. You know, I mentioned chat GPT earlier, so there's that sort of thing, but then there's, you know, general artificial intelligence and social robots and space exploration and, you know, all sorts of stuff that we just, and, you know, nanotechnology, blah, blah, all this stuff, we don't really know where all it can go. And the question in my mind is if all of this really interesting efflorescence of creativity and agency and new career paths and new technological developments and new opportunities are going to translate, or if we are going to find ways and the political will and commitment to translate those into changing structures because the current structural outlook isn't great. You look at global inequality, you get rise of authoritarianism, et cetera. And those are some really big challenges that a whole lot of additional pathways to creativity, as experienced by my students, is not necessarily going to surmount, curtail, or sort of guide us away from automatically. So my point is, and it can't. My point is we need, like, political visions that harness all of that creativity in a way that addresses not only individual level creativity, but systemic challenges as well?

Yeah, I mean, that's a sobering point. Let's just say it's a sobering.

So let me just say I'm co chairing this thing on at the Gilder Lehrman center on the future of slavery and emancipation. The question is, like, the anti slavery moment has had a anti slavery movement has a really good, like, 200 something year run. And the question is, are we at the very end of, are we at the fourth wave of an anti slavery movement where we're going to sort of put to rest once and for all this horrible form of, you know, broken human relationship, economic exploitation, etcetera? Or is this the, like, the last ray of light in the moment when there is a sort of unified idea about slavery being wrong and an economic and system that can afford to eliminate slavery and a global governance regime that has the political will to actually do something about it? Are we at the last moment when that's possible? And that's an open question. I mean, it may be that the decline of a sort of american hegemony and western governance capacity is matched by economic fragmentation, is matched by a real fragmentation of what our norms are around, who gets to be human and what rights accrue to humans. This might be the last big moment we have to make that last big push. That's why we're doing this two year working group, is to sort of explore this possibility. And so I think it's easy to get into this mode where we think, you know, better technology is going to solve, you know, climate change and ever expanding notions of rights are going to draw ever increasing number of folks into their fold and finally put to rest old forms of exploitation. You know, maybe, but only if we, again, if we use this agency, this increased agency in order to change large scale systems for good.

Yeah, well, I mean, it is, I think, you know, what I heard and that, and not to maybe sounds like a downplaying, but it's like, have as a species, have we outgrown, like, slavery as an institution? Right? Are we at that point? And I think, I think it's a really interesting question. And is it, you know, and I think, is it no longer, because unfortunately, I mean, a lot of these inequities are driven by economics like that. That is a thing. And is it no longer economically beneficial as a whole to have systems of inequity and are we headed in a direction economically where they're favoring greater equality? And that's. I mean, I think that that's a hard question to ask. And that's a hard question to answer. Easy question to ask. You know, particularly when we look at the different, like, kind of where you mentioned the sort of different complexities the world is facing right now, particularly around technology.

Like, we're not really sure, you know, income inequality, while we may say that, you know, you know, like, slavery as a whole, is outdated in income inequality, is on the rise still. And is technology and AI going to exacerbate that as we can, as individuals can consolidate a bunch of machinery into a warehouse and, you know, hire as few people as possible? Is that going to just consolidate wealth? I think it's one of the big questions that we're going to have to answer over, I would not even say over the next decade. I think it's going to define the next century.

Yeah, this is why I had said earlier, all of these focus on human rights and social movements and sort of human rights and human wrongs and rights violations is what led me to social innovation into something that was like, okay, let's look for some solutions. I also think that when I say social innovation, I tend to think that social movements are social innovations. I think better economic or better economic policy can be, can ever some attributes of social innovation. And so one of the, one of this is what's, you know, I don't have a business background. I'm trained as a sociologist and come from sort of the human rights world, as you've already, as you know, and as listeners are hearing. And so when I think of social innovation, I think, when was the last time people got together in order to have really creative ideas that made a really big change that changed lots of things for lots of people for the better? And that's my definition. And so I think that the opportunity here is, I mean, I'm also, you know, I like technology. I've written a book about drones, and, you know, I like tech.

The question is, can, can we innovate around ethics and around democracy and around identity and inclusion, etcetera, at the same rate? We can, we can innovate when it comes to technology, to science and technology. And so this, and this is the, this is the challenge, I think, of our, I don't know, our era or a generation or this moment that we're in is, yeah, this. I'm really in favor of us seeing what all we can do with technology. The question is, are we equally committed to figuring out how it is that we bring all of us along together into whatever that new space is that we create as a result of technological innovation. I don't think I've really framed it that way before in my research, but I think that innovation needs to have those. It's running on twin or multiple tracks. I'm using chat GPT right now for stuff I'm doing. I encourage my students.

I say use it and cite it, play with it, figure out what you can do with it, full on. There's a whole bunch of panic on campuses about that. I'm not panicked about that. We'll figure it out, you know, but we're going to figure it out because we're also going to get creative about how we're going to do it in a way that honors and respects the things that we happen to care about at the university level, which is academic integrity and ethics and not taking other people's work. And every other sector has got their own versions of keeping their eye on, you know, keeping their eye on the ball. And I'm mixing metaphors, two rails. Keep an eye on the ball. But anyway, the point is we can innovate in more than one way at once, and otherwise these things don't work.

And you just gave me some insight there that I really appreciate, which is perhaps even my own limited way of looking what innovation is. We think so much of innovation is technological innovation, scientific innovation, in some ways, social innovation, but those are somewhat linear ways of looking at innovation that it can encompass a whole lot more. And how we, our evolution in terms of our ethics as societies, and innovation in itself, and that is comprised of innovation as a whole, is made up of a multitude of things. When we think about an innovative organization, when we think about an innovative business, oftentimes it's ascribed to the technology that they're producing. But in fact, it can be a much broader thing when we think about what is an innovative organization, what is an innovative entity, what is an innovative society. So I think I'm really appreciating just kind of that broad scale look at that. Because in a way, from there, we can see all of ourselves as innovators, right? And we can see all of ourselves as creatives. So I'm just really, really digging that.

You know, there's this brazilian philosopher and politician sometimes named Roberto Unger, and he's at Yale law, and he has this idea that is connected to, like, really, I was gonna say out there philosophy. It's not out there philosophy, but it's philosophy. So it's like, you know, gets kind of complicated or boring to talk about really quickly. But he's really an enlivening figure in, in this field, I think, because his argument is that there is more in us as humans than there is in the world. And this is sort of an argument against. And so to get, like, academic wonky for a minute, it's an argument against folks who say it's all about economics or it's all about the government or it's all about society. And these are, and, you know, this is, this is a couple of major philosophers and social theorists who have argued this, that he's arguing against. And I'm with him on this because he says, no, that's all.

There's a lot out there. You're right. There's a lot in the market. There's a lot in the state. The government does a lot. Government's really powerful. Society and norms and cultures are really powerful. But at the end of the day, all of that stuff came from people.

And so what institutions are, institutions are desiccated humans, agency institutions are. The last time humans acted on purpose, collectively changed stuff, and then it stuck. It's not something that, it's not like the gods made it. And then we come up to it and it's like this thing you can't touch, and it's the obelisk, and we're like, oh, no, what are we going to do? No, these things are created by humans, and they're created by humans, and then humans who left them there. And then later we bump, we stub our toe on it, like, why is this laying here? And it doesn't mean we can change everything about the world all the time, anytime we want to, but it helps us reflect on where this stuff actually came from. And so I'm only, this is just, I'm just footnoting off of your point, which was, at the end of the day, all of us can be innovators, right? Because I love that. I love that all of us have something to contribute. I love, this is one more thing that I'll stop monologuing.

But anthropologist James C. Scott, who, a political anthropologist at Yale, he's got this idea of everyday anarchism, and his invitation is to ask, what, like, small rule will you break today? And, and it doesn't matter what it is. It can be the way or the sequence that you have in your own habit for your daily, your morning ritual. You're going to, like, you know, you're going to brush your teeth and then eat breakfast, or eat breakfast and then brush your teeth or you're going to cross the street against a little no walk sign or whatever it is. And our ability to break social rules is obviously shaped, or the punishments for breaking social rules are shaped by inequalities in our societies, race, class, gender, etcetera. So it's not like every, nobody can go breaking all these rules, but the question is, like, what kind of disposition do we want to have internally for ourselves toward the world? And it should be one of agency and creativity in the sense that we not are sort of masters of our own domain because that's not always the case. But we are invited into the action of creating the world with others on purpose for good.

Well, I mean, that was, I felt like a little bit like a sermon.

Sorry. You know, my dad is a preacher. Did you know that?

You know, honestly, I'm not sure if I did. Oh, my gosh. So much more makes sense now.

Oh, my goodness. I think that's what I think professors and preachers are, like, all about the same thing. It's like we sit around and we study books, and once in a while we talk in front of people and then we listen to people's problems and help to decide what might they want to do with their lives. I think it's really the same, same kind of thing.

That's hilarious. So a couple things really resonate. One, it's a phrase I don't know if I'm ever going to be able to get on my head that you've just planted, which is the desiccated human agency. Right. And I think it really stuck with me because, you know, it talks. You know, we think about our institutions. We think about organization. We think about our businesses, right.

That, you know, they were once developed by people as, you know, the, you know, the output of creativity, in a sense. But if they're not kept alive, if they're not kept current, like, they do become desiccated and antiquated and, you know, it's. And then we, you know, and instead of saying, hey, let's update the system, let's challenge this. Like, instead we're watering a dead tree and getting mad at other people that they're no longer bearing fruit, which to me is like, just sounds a little bit like lunacy.

Yeah, no, I feel like this is. And again, this stuff gets toggled around based on what sort of privilege folks have, what sort of capital resources we have, what kind of systems we're in. You know, you may have listeners who are in, I don't know, semi authoritarian states or, I mean, there's like, you know, that we all live in lots of different worlds. I want to be, like, careful how I, how I phrase this, but we really do, with our resources of time, energy, money, support institutions and or sort of, you know, institutions or structures on a regular basis, we do. This is the background to, like, this is why boycotts matter. You just withholding something. It's not a, it's not a huge, proactive, active protest. It's just the withholding of attention or of resources.

And so I think that, you know, just echoing your point, is that we, we, we feed these things for their time, energy, resources, you know, money, etcetera. And if we don't want to be part of those things, at a minimum, we, and I was saying those things in sort of like huge air quotes, like whatever we're talking about here, but the world is the way that it is because of inertia. And some of the inertia is certain ideas or institutions already encoded in the rules or in the laws or it's encoded in our behavior. We just do it routinely. And it's just something we sort of, like, you can look at something like smoking or other sort of forms of, like, social harm that were very popular at one time. And then through combinations of legislation and cultural change and personal attitudinal, behavioral change have gone away. And we think of that as the big change. But what I think you're inviting us into, which is right, is, let's go back to that moment when all of that seemed normal.

What is it that it took for people to sort of ask themselves fresh new questions about what it is they were willing to support, willing to live with, wanting to do, et cetera, and that kind of change? And I don't know. It starts with people. It starts with ideas. So there's a whole other conversation here about whether or not first movement in cultural change comes from ideas that we have and we share or with larger economic and social forces, like the law changes and then humans change with it, or do we have new ideas that diffuse through society and that sort of norm diffusion or sort of new ideas about what's right or good change people's behavior? And I think it's both. At the end of the day, big changes happen because a bunch of people say, no, that's not how we're going to do things anymore, or because policies change. And there's now a tax on something. You know, there's tax on cigarettes now, and people say, oh, yeah, I've made a decision for myself. I'm going to stop smoking when, you know, probably they're responding to a public policy.

That causal stuff gets kind of complicated.

You know, one thing that I'm just really, really picking up on here is this idea of questioning our realities, questioning our norms, questioning our culture, right? Because oftentimes we find ourselves, I find myself following the rule that I don't know when, why and how it was ever even started and whether or not it's even currently beneficial, right? And I love this idea of, like, the everyday, you know, the everyday anarchy, right? And oftentimes I try to sit with that because I was like, you know, if, if something happens in the world that actually doesn't align with my values but is in line with the system, am I going to be able to see it? Am I going to have the agency to say, hold on, I don't care what the rules say. I'm actually, I'm not going to follow through with that. That doesn't make sense. I'm not going to follow somebody else off a cliff just because that's where the road goes and there's no exits on the way, right? So I think that's something that is really important for us. And so I guess, like, as we start thinking about this, what does that mean? I guess my mind then goes to, well, how do we do this, right? How do we instill that at a larger cultural level and still maintain a system that functions?

Yeah. You know, I think that I was talking about, like, we're talking about slavery and then I talk about smoking. I make all these, like, really bad things, you know, but I also feel like, attention to that sort of, you know, everyday anarchism is limbering up a kind of, kind of agency around when we want to say yes and no to things. But I think it also limbers us up in the creative process. And I think that that's this other area. This is, you know, I'm increasingly doing more work in that space which with around around art and of creativity and emergence. Like, what happens when you get people together with a puzzle and ask them to create something that none of them have ever thought of before? So there's some really interesting experiments out there of convening people around novel questions in order to produce the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, kind of findings and kind of, you know, ideas. And so I think that limbering up is not just, you know, limbering up, you know, is not only bulwark or a personal strategy against authoritarianism or being part of systems we don't agree with.

But it's also a limbering up for the creative work of imagining more just veridant, fruitful, inclusive futures. And I feel like the human rights and the social movements community that I've been part of, certainly the way I came up, which I've already described earlier, was so focused on what was wrong and solving what was wrong and addressing these issues and raising awareness about these issues. And largely that movement, those movements have been pretty, pretty successful in raising awareness. The question now in my mind, I'm not saying all these struggles are over. Everybody's convinced. Quite the contrary. But the challenge now is, okay, what's the vision? What's the plan? What's the thing we're going to, that's the beautiful thing we're going to create together with the best of our creative intentions and the best of our emancipatory abilities. And that is not where, and I'm not trying to, like, I don't know how to finish the sentence in a way that's just and fair to all my colleagues, but that's not where the human rights world has spent all of its time, or the social movements world has spent all its time.

It's only very recently that we're talking about, okay, where does science fiction fit, right? What's up with black, like with afrofuturism and black science fiction, right? There's some really wonderful creative things that are happening out there that are not about, well, let's end human rights, so let's increase civil rights, these important, important things, but let's paint a picture of a future that we want to get really excited about building together. And so, you know, this everyday anarchism thing has got a little of like, you know, stand up for myself, independence to it. But I, what I really love it for is it exercises this creative capacity to build new things on purpose with other people for human flourishing. That's exciting to me.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. And I, again, I'm just appreciating this juxtaposition of, you know, let's, let's look at the problem, right? And let's focus on the problem versus, and again, going back that quote, what if we made it obsolete? What if we made it obsolete by just creating a future where that just, it just wasn't compatible, right? So we don't even have to try to erase it. It's just simply incompatible. And I'm curious, right? Because, I mean, so some of the pretty much everyone who's going to be listening to this would identify some way with being a social innovator. Right. So for you, what do you see as for the everyday person, like, from the work you do with students to what you, the needs you see and the opportunities you see in the world, what sort of advice or thoughts do you have for people to really lean into being a social innovator?

There's a couple of different ways to frame that. One is in the practical things to actually do sort of out in the world. But I'm not going to answer at that level unless you want to push somewhere. We can. But the first thing I find with most folks is just getting our mind to start thinking about the impossible, or the adjacent possible, as Unger calls it, or about, you know, it's just, you know, I thinking about three. What is it? What is that line from Alice in Wonderland? I think of three impossible things every morning before breakfast. I'm getting it a little bit wrong, but what is it? How can we train ourselves to really think about things we haven't thought about before? And a little bit of that is epistemic humility. And being willing to listen to people who aren't like us or listen to people who we disagree with, or listening to ideas and mulling around in our minds.

Ideas we think are, like, pretty too far out there. That's one thing. But another is not just being in listen receive humility mole mode, but in generate spark create mode. And I think there, what I tell my students is to a, to deal in volume, have lots of ideas. Don't just sort of like, fall in love with Thor, fall out of love with the first thing you think of, but deal in volume. And then the second is deal in hypotheses. And so I find that I work with two kinds of people as an educator. One is people who don't know how to do the former.

They don't know how to get started. They don't know how to generate any new ideas. They just, like, I don't even know where to start. So for them, we just work on, like, how to generate new possibilities. We work on that together. There's, you know, there's resources out there in the world on, like, how to have new ideas and how to, like, how to come up with story prompts or whatever. Right. But deal in volume.

And then theres another kind of student who have the second kind of challenge, which is they deal in volume all the time by default, and all their mind is doing is firing off new ideas. And all theyre doing is having lots of ideas. And thats not the challenge. The challenge is sorting through all of them, all those ideas and all those possibilities, all that creativity. And so to them, my recommendation is to deal in hypotheses, like pick one, try it out. Right. And so there's these two stages here. One is kind of like generative or flaring or brainstorming or whatever you want to call it, like production.

But we can't stop there, right? The next is actually like dealing in hypotheses or in minimum Bible product testing or just trying something, something out. And that is not, you know, there's people who are experts in creativity that are, that would have a much better answer than I would because be more informed by the literature. But what I just said is informed by the way that I mentor people who are either trying to get started on narrowing down their ideas or get started in having ideas in the first place. And from there, I believe we should all be having the kinds of ideas that would make the world a better place. But we've spent all of our time talking about that. But I think that's an important thing that people can take. That I hope people could take away right now is deal with creative ideas in volume, but then also pick a few to actually test out in the world and try something, because it's easy to get stuck in despair. That's bad.

It's also possibly get stuck in possibility. And I see a lot of folks who sort of get stuck at that level.

I mean, I see that with a lot of clients that I work with some clients, they're really fixed on one idea and not necessarily the outcome of the idea, but the idea itself. Or people, as you mentioned, that have so many ideas that they actually get attached to the sort of endorphin rush when you get with a new idea, but without the sort of discipline to kind of test put it into practice. So my recommendation to people is always just really become attached with the process and the outcome and be agnostic to what it looks like in getting there. And in that way, you're always looking to see actually more clearly what's right in front of you. So as opposed to simply just trying to validate what you think, you know, actually just trying to devise your ideas and your hypotheses in a way that helps you see things more clearly as they are and not being attached to what that might be. Right. And that can go for a scientific theory, that can go for a business. I see this a lot of times happen in business owners.

I have an amazing technology that's going to fix everything. But I'm more attached to the technology than I am the actual outcome or the demand for the technology. Those businesses typically fail, but people who get really obsessed, and there's a quote I really like, which is a problem well stated, is half solved if you understand the problems, while also by not being attached necessarily to what it's going to be solved with, it's going to become really clear what the path forward is and to move you through that stage of sort of the ambiguity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's, all of these, though, are almost practices. I mean, as you were talking, I was thinking these are things that we learn how to do. They're not, they're certainly not tricks or hacks, but they're not even really tools. They're a disposition or a practice. I mean, it's like, it's like meditating, you know, how do you get good at meditating? Like reading the book? No, like, you know, by, by practicing. How do you get good at running? By practicing. And I feel like this is a kind of limbering up or a kind of practice based approach that asks us, you know, what we, you know, what do we really value and what are we going to focus on.

And I love this, you know, falling in love with the, with the puzzle because I, you know, all too often we fall in love with the solutions and we can, we can lose sight, we can lose sight of the puzzle. But I'm just repeating what you just said.

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, as we kind of, kind of wind into, you know, here, there's a couple of resources recently that I've tapped into that really helped in this respect. There was a really interesting book that I'm currently reading called ten X is easier than two x, which is, it's a fascinating idea, which is simply that if you look at doubling your output or your creativity on something, it's oftentimes harder than actually trying to increase it by tenfold. Because by looking at, trying to say, well, I want to double the impact I'm having, you're just going to try to do what you're doing, but twice as much. Now, if youre looking to increase it by ten times, youre going to have to rethink the entire system. Youre going to have to rethink your entire assumptions around it. So thats one thing I really like, again, challenging your thinking, challenging your way of looking at things, challenging the way you look at innovation impact and looking at that bigger scale kind of, as you mentioned before about the impossibility piece. Lets think about something impossible.

Lets look at something that breaks a problem. I remember I once asked one of my good friends, yeah, he does a lot of woodwork. And I once asked him, I said, well, as opposed to thinking what's the most beautiful table, think about what would the ugliest table you could design look like? And it was really interesting as he started to think about that because he started to get ideas about what he would want to build, even though he was thinking about something that he wouldn't want to build or how you would make the least functional thing. Now, the other resource, one of the book is called Thinker Toys. It's an entire book about how to challenge your thinking and look at things differently from a creative problem solving methodology. It's chocked full of really great examples and really, really love that one. So awesome. I'm kind of curious, like, if you have any ideas or resources, as we kind of come to a wrap here.

I'm sure people would love to hear that.

I'm gonna go buy, go buy thinker toys. I'm gonna go buy that. I love it. No, I think that the, I think that the thing I would leave folks with is, you know, you can, you can see him talking on YouTube. It's super duper simple. Search for Roberto Unger. And he has something called notes. Notes for young people, I think.

And I watch that. I assign it to all my students. I watch it read on a regular basis. And it's about how we uncover this sort of opportunities for possibility that we may have forgotten. And so I would say by thinker toys, I'm going to. And then Google up or look up on YouTube, Roberto Unger's notes for young people. And then, if you want, I do like James C. Scott's, you know, he's got this book called two Cheers for anarchism.

Not three cheers, two cheers for anarchism. And he talks about anarchist calenthetics. How do we warm up for agency? How do we limber up for agency? And so this is a, you know, I think, the philosophical backbone in my mind for social innovation. If we're going to make the world a better place and we're going to do it together, we've got to be, you know, creative and courageous.

Amazing. Awesome. Thank you. I will put both of those links in the show notes. Austin, such a pleasure. Really appreciate this conversation, as always, and really excited to see the impact you and the students, your mentoring are going to make.

Thank you so much.

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