Hello, I'm April Chatham carpenter.

And I'm Glen white.

Welcome back to a braver Arkansas.

Today we're talking about problem solving.

Not the kind that happens in textbooks or on social media, but the kind that happens in communities and organizations and public life.

When people with different perspectives try to address a challenge together.

Our guest today is Ryan Norris.

Ryan is someone who has spent much of his career working in public policy and advocacy.

He's now moving into a role focused on bringing together very different stakeholders to solve complex problems in the area of energy.

Before we bring Ryan on, we want to explore question that affects all of us, which is how do we solve shared problems when the people involved don't agree on everything, and when the problem itself might not have a clear solution?

And Glen, I've noticed that most of the problems were solving involve people who see the world differently.

I think about climate change, AI, vaccines, animal rights, health care.

Gosh, we can go on and on.

So many different ways of seeing the world and those kinds of issues.

Yeah, and it happens in pretty much any setting.

I mean, you think about it, churches, organizations, the workplace.

Everybody has a different idea of how to solve a problem.

And usually we're thinking that, oh, there's just one right and one wrong way to do it.

We've got to find that one right way to solve the problem.

The truth is, it's often more complicated than that.

A lot of problems have different elements that different people or different stakeholders value, and that leads to different ideas of what's the most important way to solve a problem.

So those kind of problems that are so resistant to just simple one size fits all solutions have a name.

They're called wicked problems.

Wicked problems.

Well, that sounds like an interesting topic.

Actually, I've used that concept in my classes when I talk about difficult problems to solve.

But I want to make sure I understand it from your perspective.

What is a wicked problem?

Well, a wicked problem.

First of all, we could not in the moral sense.

So we were not talking about a problem that has a moral dimension.

It's rather that it's wicked because it's just wickedly difficult to solve because there's no clear one solution.

There are many attributes to the problem and also to solutions.

Any solution that you can think of may have some good and bad points, and how a particular stakeholder or person involved in figuring out the problem views.

It is going to depend upon how they value a particular aspect of the problem, or a particular approach to solving it.

So some examples you mentioned, some you know, but think about poverty, climate change, public health, even political polarization that you and I work on.

Those all are examples of wicked problems.

And then for our guest today, Ryan, he's working in an area I think we would all agree as a wicked problem.

And it has to do with national energy policy.

Yeah.

Well, interesting.

So many of these problems that I think about, they really involve something that's called competing goods.

And I know you and I have had lots of conversations about this.

It's a concept that David Brooks actually, I think introduced me to initially.

It's not whether something is good versus evil, but there's actually values that people have that are competing against each other, both of which might be really good.

So I'll give a couple of examples.

So during the Covid masking time we had, we saw people disagreeing or whether we should have mask or required mask or not because there was a competing good of safety versus freedom being told what to do.

I think about with the vaccine controversy, there's individual rights versus community responsibility.

That's an example of a competing good or even, in more locally with data centers, you know, economic development versus environmental protection and even where we put those.

And so it's not sometimes about whether something is good or bad.

It's about what values or what what things do we we want to bring up as being the most important reasons for our, our choices that we're making?

Yeah, yeah.

It's not necessarily a disagreement about facts.

Sometimes it's just which factor you think is most important in solving the problem or to to deal with.

They're all legitimate.

In fact, I would say we have this tendency with problems when someone disagrees with us to turn it into a good versus evil kind of fight.

And in this case, you mentioned competing goods.

It really is good versus good.

It's it's good to be safe and healthy.

Like when we were talking about the masking, it's good to have the right to individual freedom in making your own decisions.

They both are legitimate points.

So which way do you go?

It depends upon your value.

And that's one of the things that makes it so hard for those kinds of problems.

So what you got to do in a case like this is to find a workable balance.

It means that each side has to be willing to compromise to find something that they can live with.

That balances your concerns with the other person's concerns, since they are both basically legitimate issues.

Yeah, but that means that I can't call the other person's perspectives as bad or good, which I like.

The fact that you're saying that they're both, you know, good kinds of values or things that we might be focusing on and think about.

You know, if a person is in a community and they're planning a major community project, maybe there's a new road or maybe there's school rezoning.

And, you know, anytime you're you're building those kinds of things or changing those kinds of things, there's going to be people probably for and against for a variety of reasons.

And, you know, one group might be worried about the cost.

Another group might be worried about environmental impact.

Some people might be worried about historical preservation or the preservation of their way of life.

Other people could be worried about which neighborhoods benefit or how their children are going to be affected.

And it's really important to hear all the concerns whenever we're working on kind of coming up with a solution.

Yeah.

So you you really don't want to be picking one side as the winner.

You really want to figure out a way that you can negotiate in good faith, have some trust in the person, your or the people that you're discussing the problem with, and see if you can compromise on a solution that balances all perspectives.

And that kind of goes against our tendency sometimes to think that we have to win.

Sometimes we get emotional like that, you know, when we get into a fight flight mode, when someone disagrees with us and it's a it's kill or be killed in our emotions, it's not really that way.

So we got to watch that tendency to get real emotional about it and use our heads.

And that kind of helps us reach that, that balanced solution.

Yeah, I know in my personal life, whenever I find myself in a situation where I'm, I'm feeling really emotionally activated, I often I'm a very competitive person.

So I'm like, I'm going to win this, you know, I'm going to win this as an argument.

I'm going to win this as opposed to really listening to what the other perspectives might be.

I came across a model a few years ago in my classes that I oftentimes bring in, and I know it's probably got a different name, but the model is is it's a group decision making model, basically is what it is.

And it says that whenever we bring in people from a variety of different perspectives, that we're going to have conflict and we're going to have disagreement, but that disagreement and that conflict isn't bad.

It just means that there are other ways of looking at things that we need to consider.

And so the model itself says that when you bring in and you allow people to give their voice on things, there's a lot of divergent or or different opinions.

And what that does is that sometimes it makes us feel uncomfortable.

Right.

And so it goes into something called in the model, the grown zone.

The growth.

Well, the grown zone is when I feel so uncomfortable with all of the different opinions that I almost feel hopeless that we're going to get to a solution sometimes, or I might be like, oh my gosh, I can't believe that person just said that.

And how could they even think that?

So I cut off, I stopped listening.

And it's really hard to lean in at that moment during that grown zone to to see what are the possible ways or thinking or what are the competing goods or needs of the other group or the other person that I might not be hearing.

But it's if we can do that, if we can lean into that discomfort, then we can come up with solutions that actually converge together to try to come up with a better solution that all of the voices might be hearing.

When, when solution.

If we want to call it that.

If it's possible.

Yeah.

And sometimes it's in the middle, you know.

So neither one of us gets exactly what we want.

But that's the nature of compromise.

And remember, we are in a democratic form of government, a democratic constitutional republic.

And that means you have to be willing to compromise.

So this is what we often wind up getting into trouble with, is over these wicked problems where there's no one right way because each solution has some downsides.

So depending on which ox gets gored, I believe the saying is then that's going to make a difference as to which one you think is is the way to go.

But the point you're making, I think as good as like we, we don't and we shouldn't try to eliminate disagreement, even though that makes us more comfortable if we everybody's on the same page and we have just a few facts, we don't have to worry about it.

These complicated things don't work that way.

We have to be willing to have some disagreements because, as you kind of implied, that the more that you hear someone else's perspective, you're accumulating potentially new data that you didn't have before.

And the more information you have about a situation, the more likely you'll start to arrive at an effective solution.

So just trying to win for winning sake doesn't mean you're going to wind up with the best solution.

So it sounds like we have to spend less time trying to win the argument, and more time actually trying to understand the concerns of the other people.

Yeah, absolutely.

You know, there's a this idea of having the additional data and additional perspectives harkens back to something I'd mentioned a few episodes ago about the research on group decision making.

You may recall that that the research is very clear that when groups start to make a decision, groups that have diverse membership, people with different knowledge bases and different ways of looking at the world consistently make better decisions than groups that might be full of experts in one area, because the more perspectives you have, the more of a different knowledge bases that you bring to the table, the more creativity starts to enter into it.

And you can come up with some good ways that, you know all the experts might not have thought of.

You know, I think about, even in the group decision making literature, in terms of how we can go about finding common ground.

It's sometimes we we move to quickly to try to find the common ground.

We we ignore voices or we ignore hearing the stories behind the, the perspectives that people are sharing.

And if we try to move to quickly towards a solution, then I think compromise can be seen as, as the only, the only way of doing it.

I wanted to ask you a question about compromise, because compromise can have a negative tone to it.

Glenn, when I think about compromise, I think about I'm having to lose something.

So is it possible to actually work through the the the differences in opinions and not have to just give up on what I think is so important to come to a collaborative solution, something that all people might be saying, oh, this is even better than we expected.

If you think you're right all the time about everything, then compromise is a dirty word.

But how many people are actually that, you know, knowledgeable and competent?

I know I'm not.

So, you really need to be prepared to compromise sometimes.

And then the other thing is that you can one of the values of compromise is that you can get some things done, and then you can see how that works out.

I mean, the world changes over time and we adjust to what we encounter.

So if we make a compromise, make a decision, try to use this solution and we find some things that aren't working well, but other things are, we go back and tweak it.

But if we just stay into a win lose mentality, then we're probably going ultimately have more bad decisions.

But that's a good point I think about sometimes I think about the decisions that we make.

We think, oh, we're stuck with them forever, right?

It's not like some of the decisions, especially in these wicked problems.

Right?

There can be something that we try out and see if it works, and then we come back and bring the people again to the table and say, okay, how is this working, you know, in your community, how is it working?

So I think about that even in laws and things that that might come forward that affect people in, in the state of Arkansas, if we just come up and say, okay, we think this law is the the main thing that it's going to work, it's going to fix things, but we never actually ask later, hey, what are the unintended consequences that came and how can we solve and fix those unintended consequences?

Then we've lost an opportunity to actually make things better.

And that brings us to our guest.

Ryan Norris has spent years working in advocacy and public policy through Americans for prosperity, Arkansas.

He now serves with the Abundance Institute, where his work on energy policy will involve balancing the priorities of stakeholders with very different perspectives.

Which really raises an interesting question.

Can strong advocacy and meaningful collaboration coexist?

Yeah.

Ryan has served in a variety of public service and policy roles.

He's worked with the Arkansas Secretary of State's office, the American Red cross, and Americans for Prosperity in Arkansas.

He's also helped lead statewide conversations on civic engagement, including the Arkansas Civic Health Index project.

And that project brought together leaders from different sectors to better understand the opportunities and challenges that face Arkansas communities.

So what interests me is that Ryan's career has increasingly focused on bringing people together to solve these difficult, wicked problems, even when there's real disagreement.

And I'm looking forward to hearing what he's learned about turning disagreement into productive solutions, and what the rest of us can learn from those experiences.

Yeah.

So let's find out when we come back.

Welcome to Arkansas.

Ryan.

We're so glad to have you here.

I'm going to start out with an easy question.

I think what's going to be easy?

And what in the world drew you into all this public policy work?

Well, the the reason that I enjoy it so much is because it's about helping remove barriers from people's lives and help them achieve what I believe to be their American, a chance to achieving their American dream.

I don't know what their American dream may be, but I know that when barriers are identified that help, you know they're hindering them from that.

I want to be helpful in finding out what the true nature of the problem is.

Who are the stakeholders pulling them together, figuring out a solution.

And when that solutions realizing you later on, find out that your public policy that you've worked on has helped people improve their economics or their education, or their ability to take advantage of opportunities that makes you feel good inside.

Let me ask you this.

You've worked in a lot of different environments.

I know you were sick of state's office, right?

Yes.

And the Red cross and then most recently, Americans for prosperity.

So if you look back, can you tell me kind of what threads seem to connect all those experiences for you?

Yeah, I think that the the thread is again trying to help individuals.

When I was at the American Red cross, it was about making sure there was enough blood in the cooler to take care of the needs of our hospitals, and that was very meaningful work to me.

I then went to the Arkansas Secretary of State's office, Under Secretary Mark Martin, and there he gave me a commission.

He's like your project manager, so we'd like you to improve services for our people and cut costs.

And we did both of those things.

Have people even today combining man, it's so much easier to file for my business or to use fillable PDFs or to pay my franchise taxes online.

Those were projects that I got to work on and and have helped people improve their life.

And then in my time nearly nine years in Americans for prosperity.

Similar thing when you're able to have someone that's frustrated by the circumstances that policy has put them in, and you're able to find a policy solution to help them with that, and they come back later like, hey, did you know that this is happening?

Or or this is going on and it's positive to my life.

And you sit there and you're like, well, that's again, that makes you feel good.

It gives you a sense of purpose, makes the work and the late nights and working on weekends worth it?

Yeah, I hear all the overcoming barriers.

That seems to be the common bread then.

Yeah, it really is.

A lot of people don't understand why their life has become complex.

And why is the cost of living increasing on me?

Why are my energy prices higher?

Why do I have opportunities?

Or why are my opportunities limited?

And then once you identify what it is they want to solve as a problem, you focus in on that.

You pull them in, you research the issue, you get more voices involved in it, and you create that consensus that's needed to move that issue forward.

A lot of policy moves by consensus there that that's moved through through kind of strong arming through the process and those that understand the process.

And I've seen that firsthand.

But the best policy is the one that is that society is ready to advance together on.

I think about so many of the roles that you've had, and even as you were talking just now, remind me of the importance of advocacy.

Advocacy is really important.

Advocating for certain policies, advocating for certain kinds of things that you think will make life better for people.

And yet we were just talking about collaboration.

So those things can come in detention.

What?

How do you see the two working together?

Advocacy and collaboration.

Yeah.

So advocacy and collaboration.

I think that no one group is of significant enough size to be able to move consensus in and of themselves, and therefore you start reaching out beyond your advocacy group to find more who are interested in maybe solving the problem, maybe from a different angle, or have a different perspective.

I have often used the approach of.

I look at advocacy organizations and what their principles and their vision are.

I compare those against my principles of vision, find as much overlap as I can, and my initial approach to them is, hey, all of these issues right here, we either agree on or we share principles around.

Can we talk about how we can create solutions that fit our principles collectively, and then work on this problem that we've both identified?

So you have a good response there.

And it kind of brings up this kind of related question about advocacy.

How would you.

Some people are very partizan.

And how would you distinguish advocacy from Partizanship?

Well, advocacy if done in the mold that that the mental model that I ascribe to is again focusing in on problems and creating consensus.

It is nothing to do with political partizanship.

It really is about people who care deeply about issues, no matter where they're at on the spectrum politically, and they want to see a solution.

Realize what we're finding out is that with the the political system that we have, it's harder and harder to do that.

We're now talking about another government shutdown here in the United States again.

And people that I've talked to, even from the Democrat side, there's some bills being advanced about the no more government shutdowns kind of bill.

And that's a bipartisan bill.

It's not about politics.

It's about we can't have government shut down each and every time in one side who happens to be in power that's not in power.

Using it as a political football to try to gain consensus and then pin blame on everybody.

Let's get beyond the blame games.

Let's get beyond that.

And that's where advocacy comes in.

And I mean advocacy across the spectrum.

Some of the relationships that I have built would probably on my center, further center.

Right.

I've actually been dinged on saying you've been too close with these individuals, but that doesn't negate the fact that they do have a perspective.

They have a sincere and authentic problem to be solved.

We share the same idea that we do want to solve that problem, too.

From our perspective, how can we collaborate together so advocacy and partizanship can be separated?

I think.

But we do view things so much in our culture right now through political lenses.

I mean, everything can become political.

You have to push that noise aside to focus on the problem and then just say, can I build trust and relationship to where we can together have that sense of collaboration can move us forward?

It sounds like the advocacy focus is not just on your particular partizan bent, but on values generally.

And so sometimes values are more important than what a particular party or side is thinking at the time 100%.

Because parties exist to maintain party control or party power to grow the party's influence.

And again, not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself, but we're now finding that it creates more gridlock and less solutions than than we would need to desire.

And we need to do it quickly.

So many of our problems be housing, be it energy policy, be it food, agriculture, whatever it may be, we need solutions now.

The longer we we keep from a solution, the more people have to exist in that less than optimal, you know, lifestyle or or with those limited opportunities.

And I think that we need to use advocacy to come together, create that consensus and, and push push the political football down the field.

It can be so amazing when you have someone on the left, let's say someone on the right, working each of their as trusted messengers to the partizans to come together at a juncture to move policy forward.

And that's as happened here in Arkansas.

I'd love to hear a story about that, actually, because I think about as you're talking about advocacy, I keep thinking about, oh, I always pair it to winning, but it's really not about your side winning.

It's really about solving problems in a way that what your interests are are met, but also considering the interest of others.

So can you tell us an example mean you worked for Americans for prosperity for nine years in Arkansas?

So I and I know from talking to you in the past that you've been involved in lots of policy discussions and bringing diverse members of people together.

Tell us about one success.

Well, one success that I would say is there was and this is meaningful to me because of the result that we we got, not only in just passing the legislation, but also just opening up minds to a different perspective.

Criminal justice was an important policy issue set for me when I first started at Americans for prosperity.

I'm not justice involved.

I don't have family in law enforcement or any of that.

But after I had talked to a lot of people about their experiences, I realized that it may be a system that I don't I don't want to have to ever go through, because I could see where the barriers came up for them, policy barriers.

And so there was an instance that we worked on a piece of legislation.

And before we did that, the mainly this issue had been considered a left leaning issue, but we were able to get my left leaning friends.

Some of them are now judges, actually, in Pulaski County in front of Republican caucus, to talk to them about the issue, to have other trusted voices from the right, from the Republican Party, that we're working with us to also give their perspective.

And my closing to them was this you've heard about a particular problem from people that span the spectrum from left to right and in the middle, that shows you that this is an issue that is of such significance that it's bringing people together.

And I would like you to consider this, this policy.

And I had a phone call from a lawmaker.

Call me.

And I said, you know, I had I always asked, where is there?

You know, this issue of of systematic racism in a policy piece.

And based on what we presented that day, he walked away going, I now can see that this piece of policy fits, that it is just inherently unfair and we need to change it.

And his vote was there among those that helped pass that legislation.

And I was very proud of that piece, because that piece helped an additional 6000 people potentially, you know, seal their criminal records, which gave them better opportunities at housing, at education and at employment without decreasing public safety.

These are folks who for years had been improved and rehabilitated and been productive members of our society.

So that kind of thing made me very excited to help bring that together.

So how do you handle when you have you're advocating for a particular position and you get someone who disagrees with you.

How are you able to maintain that openness to hear their side when you kind of maybe have some strong feelings in a different direction?

Well, I am actually informed in those instances by G.K., he said.

It's not bigotry to think that you're right.

It's bigotry.

Do you think you can't possibly be wrong?

And I paraphrase him a little bit.

And so I approach there are organizations that are completely opposite in their intended goals or are visions of the future.

Then then Americans for prosperity that are worked for.

But what I did is I approached them with some humility and some vulnerability and said, hey, what do you care about?

Why do you care about it?

Can you can you convince me to carry about it as much as you do?

Why is your perspective on the solution coming from this angle?

And my perspectives come from this angle.

And when you when you have that conversation, you realize that it's a reasonable it can be reasonable to understand how they got there.

And so you can share maybe common vision without even having to share common ground at certain points.

But if the common vision is to solve the problem, and I go back to that again, solving the problem, truly wanting to solve a problem and not use the problem as some other kind of proxy to gain influence power or whatever, because as Reagan said, it's amazing what get when you don't care who gets the credit.

And so that's the that's the mental model that I've used.

And I talk to them and say in these, here's my solution.

What about my solution creates the most amount of like fear of loss or what's the issues that you have.

And just being vulnerable that and hearing them out.

I think that when you approach it that way and then also you put in some work, you know, find the issue.

What I've done, too is I found the number one issue or the highest priority of issue that we could agree on.

And I've put my time, my resources and my energy into proving my authentic intention to be a good faith partner.

You said it.

And I was going to mention that because what I hear over and over out of that is good faith efforts, yes, at solving the problem, as opposed to using it as a leverage for some greater gain of power for yourself or your party or something.

Because in the positions that I've been in, I have had those come to me and say, hey, we'd like you to consider this.

And it rings true as something that I would like to work on and to help solve a problem.

But then when you start breaking it down, you find out there's caveats built into things that actually are going to help, you know, help their side more than than the other side.

I don't I don't have to accept accept those as solutions.

I can then go back and say, hey, here's a better solution that fits more people.

Okay, well, let's let's change things just a little bit because I know that you've been involved in work with the Arkansas Civic Health Index.

We've talked about that in previous episodes.

I wonder if you could tell our viewers a little bit about that effort overall, what your part has been with it, and it probably helps if you just kind of explain what this whole idea of civic health and the Civic Health Index means.

Yeah.

So in the Civic Health Index, what attracted me to it is we do need a baseline as to how are people engaging in their communities and in government, and what is their knowledge about what's available to them in civics to make changes?

What I, I, I appreciate about our democracy representative, you know republic constitutional republic is that it replaced ruling by might and it now has moved to where we now are build we we are governed by a consensus.

And so in that the Civic Index was needed, I think, to help baseline where we're at and then to project what we might need to be doing as a state to improve civic engagement.

So they looked at voting, voting participation.

They looked at trust and civic institutions and and we participated as somewhat funders of that.

We contributed to that.

And, and I think that what came out of that was very interesting in general, people on the day to day when they when you take away the the political out of it, people do want to collaborate.

They do want to solve problems collectively and together.

When I was at Red cross, I saw this all the time.

People would have disaster areas and no one would care what your political affiliation was.

They were trying to solve a problem for their community and help them.

They'd bring food, water.

They would spend their time helping dig people out of debris, or they'd do.

They'd stand in line for hours to donate blood.

So that's who we are at the core.

How do we start getting that core of of decency and in interaction and together and put that on our largest problems, just not just our local problem, but our largest problems and solving, solving them.

So part of that is bringing people to the table that are working together in good faith, like you were talking about good faith partners.

And part of it, it's also recognizing that we need to be able to open ourselves up to different ideas.

And so when I think about all that you've said so far, one of the things that I've, I asked myself is, how do we know who needs to be at the table?

Because in Arkansas we have a lot of people that with great ideas.

Yeah.

And sometimes it's easy for us to be able to just say we're going to have the the typical partners, the typical people at the table.

But how do you decide who's going to be at the table?

Well, the the assumption is that I, that I decide, you know, and I don't, I don't yeah, there is a lot what I do think is helpful in you build a bigger table.

You pull in individuals who have something to contribute, even from a totally different perspective.

You could have them come in and present to you, scenarios or, or second or third order impacts that you had not considered.

And so there, there are those that, that I found to be to operate in very good faith.

And I would ask them, who else needs to be here?

You know, you and I build this great relationship.

Can you be my voice to other people as we try to create a solution that's more robust?

Or here's what I'm thinking.

Is there more that we could add?

And so you can start seeing this, this rings of of influence is the wrong term.

But, you know, you rings of communication and networking that can bring people to the table that you you're like, man, I would not have thought about that perspective.

I wouldn't have known this person.

But for the good relationship that I built with my colleague who is from a different organization, I'm that you who, whenever anyone tries to do this, that they're also building relationships before they bring them to the table.

Yes.

And that that's also important.

So one of the things I'd love for you to talk about is, as you've gone across the state of Arkansas and you've met with many different people with different perspectives, and you brought them to various tables, what have you learned about Arkansans in general?

Strengths of us?

Yeah.

Well, first off, we all share the same problems.

We all have the same problems.

And I even say that's globally.

If I had the benefit of being able to travel a little bit, even nationally, internationally, and everyone's problems are pretty much the same.

They want to feed themselves, they want to house, they want a little, you know, a little bit of certainty about a future.

They want education, you know, they want a good future for their children.

I want all those things.

Everyone that I've ever talked to once, those kind of things.

So how do we construct that, you know, is the is the issue.

But what I have found is if you if you were open to individuals, authentically open to them, and you say, hey, here's my idea, what's your idea?

How can we find where there they work together?

People who again of good faith, who want to solve the problem will open up and they will have those what I would call trade offs.

Trade offs are a little maybe I would can be equated to maybe what we would say compromise.

But the way that I look at it is if the solution that we are creating does not violate either of our principles, then it's not so much a, you know, we're not giving up anything.

We are actually advancing things a little further down that we couldn't advance in and of ourselves alone.

And so that's what I try to create with individuals.

And what I found that Arkansans are willing to work on.

There are friends of mine who go into rooms I could not go into just because the fact of who I've worked for and they wouldn't be well received, but they can go in and they can say the same thing that I would say.

They could talk about how I'm willing to work in good faith, and they can bring more people to the table.

That is what in general, Arkansans are about.

The largest growing political demographic in the United States is the unaffiliated voter.

It's the voter who does not fit left or right politically.

And in that, I see this awesome opportunity for those who are of a collaborative and consensus mindset, who want to advocate for our biggest problems to be solved, to use that as an opportunity to bring people again of good faith together to solve these problems.

And you have to do it without a agenda.

That is is a win lose scenario.

You create the win win scenarios and those are doable.

Much more complex.

More time, more relationship is needed.

But it is possible.

Yeah.

You know, I think one of the things that is a strength for Arkansas from that Civic Index funding was the neighborliness, the the willingness to talk with each other.

And that I know contributes to what you're talking about.

But I'm thinking I want to make sure we get to the your work with the Abundance Institute.

And so I think you have a couple of things you want to cover with him.

Well, first of all, I, I've loved your work because I followed it with the Americans for prosperity and, and just the collaborative nature.

And so I was a little disappointed, I'll be honest, when I heard that the Abundance Institute had recruited Jews.

So what made that happen?

Yeah.

Well, you know, I've been had been state director for Americans for prosperity, Arkansas, for nearly nine years, longest serving in that role and loved every second of it.

But I have, as I've watched our society the big deal coming up at the moment, the conversation that has always been, but particularly coming to a head now, is energy policy.

And it is right now a win win lose scenarios are the things that are being talked about.

Can we strong arm our energy perspective onto policy?

And that's not the way to go about it in my mind.

Again, as we've been talking about, we need more collaborative, more inclusive information put together to create find that Venn diagram to where we can find the perfect solutions.

And those do exist.

Again, they do exist.

So when abundance called me up and had some of them had known of my work collaboratively and knew about my knowledge that I had gained over the last couple of years in energy policy, they're like, hey, we need a voice that's going to help convene people, that's going to take industry and those interested in rate, you know, the rates and how high they can be, or about climate and environment issues and bring them all together, which is what I also love about abundance is that they are supported by a large, wide variety of individuals that that cover all of these issues.

So they are naturally collaborative.

We need that collaborative solution and they they agree on that.

And so I get to work in the C3 space for a while on one piece of policy energy, increase my depth of knowledge in their help to design solutions that industry and ratepayers and environmentalist can possibly get around.

And then again, make sure that America has its it's needed energy for the current and the future.

You really have a wicked problem you're dealing with.

Very.

We're talking about that.

Right.

So, I one example of what we're talking about, you know, all the competing goods and things like that, the stakeholders you're going to be dealing with have a lot of different priorities, and there's a lot of disagreement.

And one of the things let's use is one example, government regulation when it comes to, you know, policy and energy practice, you know, there's one side that argues, you know, you need sufficient regulation to make sure the environment in people's safety and things like that are taking into account the other side is excessive regulation interferes with efficient operation of things.

And so both both of those are goods, right.

So what's the right way to balance things.

How do you think about encountering problems like that in the work that you're going to be doing?

Well, sometimes you look into the terms of what what I call constraints.

Where's the constraint?

If we all agree, let's say that we need more energy.

Where are the constraints in that?

So there's national policy that comes from Congress around that.

There's regional policy that comes from like your your regional transmission organizers like Miso and others that run the grid, the that itself and set the policy for that.

And then you have your states that also have policy that dictate what can and cannot be built in a state or how it will be built.

And so what I'm looking at is those constraints, and the way that I am trying to inform myself is what contributes literally to safety.

And then what are those processes that have just become some of this policy is decades and decades old.

It's no longer caught up to the technologies that we have now.

So in that instance, how do we communicate that that we need to update it to where, for example, I would say with nuclear reactors, the nuclear reactors that were now able to bring on board, such as the small modular reactors, use a molten salt instead of like a heavy water system, and therefore they aren't prone at all hardly to meltdowns like we're that we're used to.

You know, we have in our minds from Sean, Bill and all those, those kind of things.

And so it's a different technology requiring a different approach or a different analysis of safety.

So those kind of things you can look at and say, okay, we need to update the policies to where it is more in line with the real safety risks now than under the old, because the old model applied to the new technology makes no sense.

So trying to work that out, don't take anyone's fears for granted, is something that I also look at to is that I'm just like, okay, you're fearful of this.

How can I talk you through to where you feel like the safety is still there, but we can speed things up to make sure we get the energy we need is even if you're someone who is concerned, say, about climate change, we've done a lot as a as a country.

And, you know, there's always those that argue, we need to do much more in, in, you know, in our approach towards climate change.

But one of the things that we do know we need to do is adapt to it and to adapt to it.

We're going to need energy.

We potentially we may need desalination plants on the coast of the United States to pipe water to where it needs to be.

We need to make sure that our elderly have air conditioning in the summer.

We need to make sure that all these other possibilities are there.

So while we're also working and possibly decrease a carbon footprint, we also need to look at the energy necessary to adapt to that changing climate.

And so when you have conversations like that, it opens up more possibilities of solutions.

And, and, you know, perspective.

Wow.

I can tell you've already started going deep into this energy stuff because I don't think we've ever had conversations offline here about energy with you.

So this is interesting to hear about.

I, I do think sometimes when we talk about these big, wicked problems and these big issues that our viewers, myself included, could be like, yeah, that's kind of out there.

And like I that, you know, all of those people, those people, whoever those people are, decide those kinds of things.

And I do think that sometimes we can feel powerless.

And I wonder what you would say to any viewer that might be sitting here.

I'm like, oh, they're talking about stuff that, yeah, I'll let those other people take care of you.

Yeah.

You know, having worked in advocacy, advocacy, there there are fulcrum is that if you apply the right levers to will move policy and consensus, I think has been the best one consensus can even overwhelm, you know, entities that have large lobbying, you know, capabilities, you can overwhelm that.

And what I would suggest is if you really have a problem, talk to someone else.

It could be just a neighbor starting off.

But if you get enough people together that share the same problem and you start opening it up to what could the potential solutions be?

And you aggregate more and more people along the path to to the solution.

It can make a difference.

One voice can start this snowball effect that makes a difference in the in the capital here in little Rock, or in your city council or even at the federal level.

And so you've got to Americans for prosperity has a right now called one small step.

You just take one small step, put your voice out there on social media just for a few minutes, and you're going to know that there's people that support or oppose whatever it is you're on.

Find the ones that support you.

Start.

Start a Facebook group, cascade that out from there.

Add good information along the way.

Never stop improving on the knowledge that you have.

I will say that because there's times I've seen myself walk in and think, oh, okay, I've got this under wraps.

I know what to say, know what to do.

But then I find out that there's been some additions or some changes that I hadn't fully considered that would make my solution maybe moot, or maybe antiquated or not really going to solve the problem.

So I do say that don't just go off it completely emotionally.

You need to add knowledge and then add some wisdom.

A lot of this is about message discipline, staying on topic, talking about what you're going to talk about.

Know what you know what upside down and backwards.

Aggregate enough people together to make a difference and then get to those decision makers your local state senator, your state representative, your mayor, whoever may be.

And just start there and then you'll know based on their reaction, what the next steps are going to need to be.

Will it be a a letter writing campaign?

Will it be phone calls?

Will it be door knocks?

Will it be a press conference on the on the Capitol steps?

You'll know what to do there.

Just don't give up.

Stay courageous in and find people out there who are willing to talk with you.

You win by bringing more people to your side than those that hold the other opinion.

So always keep an open end to who can join in in your efforts.

And winning here, just to clarify, doesn't mean that it's just I'm pushing my my might my way through with all these people that are like me.

Because I've also heard you say we need to bring in the voices of people who might think differently.

So that would also be something that you would probably encourage 100%.

You're talking about solving the wicked problem, right?

And that's why we're here.

Well, listen, I appreciate it.

We're out of time.

Thanks so much for joining us.

We really enjoyed talking with you, Ron.

I've always enjoyed talking with you.

Thank you for all the work that you've done and that you're going to continue doing on these important issues.

Thank you very much for having me.