Every season of Overloaded has a voice you hear constantly but never meet. In this finale, I bring that voice forward. Nathan Fink, chief advancement officer at Family Connects and the technical producer of Season 4, has been shaping every episode from behind the curtain - selecting music, weaving media clips, editing hours of conversation into the collage episodes that have defined this season's sound. In this closing conversation, Nathan and I step back to examine how the season was made, the creative choices behind it, and what we learned along the way. The season started taking shape in 2025 when Nathan and I recorded standalone interviews at the Prevent Child Abuse America conference in Portland for PCAA's podcast, The Shift, with Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, Dr. Bruce Perry, Desmond Meade, and others. Each conversation was distinct, but a pattern kept emerging: the stories we tell ourselves, and how those stories either keep us stuck or open new possibilities. That pattern became the starting point of Season 4, and Dr. Burke Harris's "code card" metaphor opened a pathway to what would come next: a new narrative, like a medical emergency protocol, has to be practiced until it becomes a reflexive response, not a one-time insight. We also pull back the curtain on some of our hardest editorial decisions, including how we thought about sequencing difficult content; and why leading with fear or rage closes off the very parts of the brain that can absorb a better story. By the end, we explore many of the lessons from the season that come into focus: relationship before narrative; discipline over talent; centering what has been invisible; and getting back in front of each other across difference, not as a soft suggestion, but as the prerequisite for everything else. Let this be the beginning.
Today's episode included the following speakers (in the order they appear):
Host: Luke Waldo
Guest:
Also featured (archival clips from the season):
00:15–03:34 – Luke Waldo
Luke opens the season finale by bringing his technical producer, Nathan Fink, to the foreground for the first time. After a season of conversations about the science, strategy, and humanity of storytelling, this episode steps behind the curtain to examine how the season was actually made: the choices, tensions, creative principles, and behind-the-scenes partnership that shaped what listeners heard.
03:34–11:03 – Luke Waldo and Nathan Fink: How the Season Began
Luke and Nathan trace the season's origin to the 2025 Prevent Child Abuse America conference in Portland, Oregon, where they recorded interviews for PCAA's podcast, The Shift, with Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, Dr. Bruce Perry, Desmond Meade, and others. These were standalone interviews with no designed connective tissue between them. But across almost every conversation, Luke began hearing the same thread: the stories we tell ourselves, and how those stories either keep us stuck or open new possibilities.
Nathan describes the balance their partnership found. Luke brings deep field expertise and years of practice in the subject matter; Nathan brings a storyteller's instinct and a journalist's ear for what's actually being said versus what's being asked. The creative principle they landed on: do the preparation thoroughly, then let go of it in the room. Be in the conversation you're in, not the one you planned. Nathan illustrates this with a reference to Charlie Parker, who said if he had to practice one thing for his whole life he'd practice scales, because when he got on stage, he forgot everything he'd practiced, he lived in it.
15:45–23:37 – Luke Waldo and Nathan Fink: How Season 4 Took Shape
Luke describes the creative genesis of Season 4: the Portland interviews were not yet a season, but a recurring pattern was becoming visible. Every major conversation, whether about brain science, voting rights, clinical psychology, or child welfare, kept returning to the stories we tell ourselves and how those stories trap us or liberate us. Dr. Nadine Burke Harris named it explicitly. Tshaka Barrows named it through the railroad tracks metaphor. Desmond Meade named it through the power of a single question asked across political divides.
The season's connective thread emerged from those patterns: if we can't challenge harmful mental models, no amount of evidence will shift the systems built on them. Luke credits Dr. Burke Harris's "code card" metaphor as a turning point; the idea that a new narrative, like a medical response protocol, has to be practiced until it becomes the reflexive response, not just understood intellectually.
This crystallized the role of Jess Moyer and the FrameWorks Institute as the season's co-pilot; providing not just insights, but the discipline and methodology to move from telling good stories to building narratives that embed themselves and shift mental models over time. Luke notes that the title Overloaded itself came from FrameWorks' work with Prevent Child Abuse America on reframing childhood adversity.
27:00–37:05 – Luke Waldo and Nathan Fink: Standout Episodes and Creative Choices
Luke names Episode 7 (Do Stories Really Work?) as possibly his favorite episode across all four seasons, crediting Nathan's editing artistry for weaving Megan McGee, Rinku Sen, Tarik Moody, Jess Moyer and Dr. Uri Hasson into a coherent, propulsive narrative that demonstrated the very principles it was describing. Episode 9 (Recipes for Success: Building Community Through Food, Art, and Culture) emerged from a pattern neither of them had anticipated: nearly every guest, unprompted, returned to the power of shared meals and sensory experience as the prerequisite for genuine connection and narrative change.
38:00–48:26 – Luke Waldo and Nathan Fink: Hard Decisions and Political Terrain
Luke and Nathan address one of the season's most difficult creative decisions: the inclusion of an immigration raid clip in Episode 8, sourced from a 2012 news report during the Shattered Families segment with Rinku Sen. Luke's initial reaction when he heard it was visceral; it startled him, and his instinct was to protect listeners who might be personally affected by what was happening in Minneapolis at the time of recording.
Nathan's perspective: the clip was chosen deliberately to show how far the goalposts had moved over a decade, and to make the abstract concrete. His question was whether the podcast could keep listeners who held dominant narratives, even unwittingly, engaged long enough for the counter-narrative to land. Drawing on Rinku Sen's teaching, both agreed that you can speak to people, but you cannot speak at them.
53:25–1:04:11 – Luke Waldo and Nathan Fink: The Season's Core Lessons
Luke and Nathan distill what the season ultimately taught them, both as practitioners and as storytellers:
1:04:11–1:14:36 – Luke Waldo and Nathan Fink: What Comes Next
Luke closes with gratitude to the season's full cast of contributors: the guests from The Shift at the PCAA conference, the narrative change strategists, the systems thinkers, the community builders, and the truth tellers and lived experience leaders.
He reflects on the season's sound design: the ambient sounds of spring and subtle instrumentation were chosen deliberately to till the soil and create the internal conditions in listeners for openness before the harder conversations began.
Nathan closes with an invitation: don't let the season end here. Circulate it. Use it with your teams, partners, and communities. The podcast is not the destination. The relationships and practices it points toward are.
Luke: "Let this be the beginning." Reach out to Luke at lwaldo@childrenswi.org for supportive materials to continue reflection and learning.
Closing Credits
Join the conversation and connect with us!
Luke Waldo 00:15
Welcome to season 4 of Overloaded: Understanding Neglect, where we explore how stories and narratives shape what we believe and how we act, and how we might tell different stories that change the narrative so that all children and families can thrive.
Hey everyone, this is Luke Waldo, your host for this podcast series and the Director of Program Design and Community Engagement for the Institute for Child and Family Well-being, our partnership between Children’s Wisconsin and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Helen Bader School of Social Welfare.
Nathan Fink serves as the chief advancement officer at Family Connects, a national nonprofit who implements a universal evidence-based nurse visiting model for the families of newborns. He is a former visiting professor of writing, rhetoric, and discourse at DePaul University. Nathan is the technical producer of season four of Overloaded, and through the shared journey of imagining and creating the season of the podcast, he has become a friend. Nathan, welcome to the season four finale of the podcast.
Nathan Fink 01:22
Thank you for having me. You know, I do suppose, though, I've been here all along, kind of like a shadow, though, that that does sound ominous.
Luke Waldo 01:30
Yeah, right. No, and an important shadow for certain, because this, the season of the podcast, would not have been possible without you in the background, and so it's exciting bringing you to the foreground to reflect together on this journey that really started much before we started recording, as we met in the summer of 2025 in, well before Portland, and we met through Jennifer Jones, who's been on this podcast a number of times, and she shared a bit about your background, particularly in storytelling, that was very appealing to me, because storytelling and narrative had been on the forefront of my mind. So, why don't you share a little bit of your background, how you got to this moment in your career as a storyteller?
Nathan Fink 02:18
Yeah, well, thank you for that in that space. You know, I, speaking of PCA America, once told Dr. Melissa Merrick this, that I'm a terrible interview because my background is hard to explain, and how I came to be at this point in my life, but really my life's work has been centered around how do you tell a better story. My graduate studies were in narrative development, and over the years I found myself teaching it in a university setting, or applying it through the writing, say, of grants to further community mental health efforts, or then on a population level, primary prevention, which, of course, is how we came to meet, and now with Family Connects, and I think one of the things that's really interested me over my career is how do we tell this story in a way that allows families like mine, like yours, all the families we see at parks, wherever we are, right? How does, how do we tell that to further a success narrative? And so that then has led me to you, and if I'm not mistaken, when Jennifer Jones introduced us, I was wrapping a podcast that I was recording then, called New Hampshire Family Now, which I think had four seasons and near 100 episodes.
Luke Waldo 03:34
Lots of episodes, man.
Nathan Fink 03:36
So she connected us, and I remember her saying, you know, he is from Milwaukee, and my first thought was, I bet he knows my wife, which is in a roundabout way true.
Luke Waldo 03:49
Yeah, Small-waukee, you know, Wisconsin natives, we definitely have our six degrees of separation in one form or another. Now it's been fascinating working with you, you know, discovering many shared values when it comes to the impact and importance of storytelling, of the stories we tell ourselves, which is a lot of what we're going to reflect on over the course of this conversation as we wrap up what has been a really fulfilling and learning-filled season of the Overloaded podcast.
So before we get there, it is again important, I think we start at the beginning, and how we got here in the first place, and we've both mentioned Dr. Melissa Merrick and Jennifer Jones, our valued partners at Prevent Child Abuse America, and their introduction between the two of us as an opportunity to work together in the 2025 Prevent Child Abuse America conference, and recording their podcast, The Shift. And for me it was an exciting opportunity, first and foremost, to continue the partnership with PCAA. But also an opportunity to learn from somebody else who's really passionate about this medium, the use of podcasting as a tool to reach an audience, to build kind of real relationships between the audience and the storytellers, and it was also an exciting opportunity because they were asking us to have conversations with people who in my field have really transformed in many ways the narrative, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, Dr. Bruce Perry, Desmond Meade, and many others, and so I want us to talk a bit about that opportunity and how it, of course, then led to season four of Overloaded, because it wasn't necessarily a straight line. So, how do you recall those first encounters?
Nathan Fink 05:48
Yeah, well, I, I first think about you and I on a Zoom call, probably the first three were spent laughing, commiserating, talking about why Midwest parents say goodbye from their garage, like all of the things that made me kind of laugh and get to know you and our sensibilities, and as we progressed, there was this moment of us trying to talk about the conversation we thought we wanted to have, and then I think about going back to that tiny little room in a basement in Portland, Oregon, and having that first person walk through the door, and just thinking, oh yeah, the reason being when you prepare for conversations like this, there's the part of you that is stepping into that all of the things you want to say or ask, but the question I have, I suppose, is how in the world do you prepare to interview Dr. Nadine Burke Harris?
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris 06:48
Do you want me to speak truthfully?
Nathan Fink 06:50
Dr. Bruce Perry?
Dr. Bruce Perry 06:52
It's interesting, I've been given many opportunities, right? You know, talked to presidents, talked to senators for over 40 years.
Nathan Fink 06:58
Desmond Meade?
Desmond Meade 07:00
How many times have you sat down with someone who was one of the 100 most influential in the world, MacArthur Genius Fellow, and had an organization nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize?
Nathan Fink 07:11
So, when I think back, of course, it's it's the relationship you and I had, but then it becomes the relationship we think we have with the material, the relationship we think we have with our own kind of awe, because we live in it, I think differently. You are, I would say, of the field. I'm kind of on the edges that even our preparations of the type of questions we ask, if you go back to The Shift, I marvel at all of the ways that you draw from policy, practice, and then I could catch myself thinking, well, what does that mean to me as I'm trying to say take my son for a swim?
Luke Waldo 07:51
Yeah, interesting.
Nathan Fink 07:52
So that makes me want to kick it back to you, though, because in my memory is a tiny room getting ready for, say, Nadine Burke Harris, and then realizing that you have paced about 4000 times.
Luke Waldo 08:08
Yes, so my oh moment, and we can bleep that again, was as you put it, right? I'm in all of my feelings with Dr. Nadine Burke Harris coming down. Our anticipation of her coming into that small podcast studio is really rooted in, one, profound respect and admiration for the work that Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and the others we've mentioned have done really to put scientific evidence behind, in many cases, the stories we've been telling ourselves for many years, right, the feeling we have about why we behave the way we behave, why we react to certain stimuli, and the way we react, why certain individuals struggle and others prosper, and so one, it was just right, this deep respect and admiration. And the stress, in many ways, the healthy stress of wanting to get that conversation absolutely right, that we have 30 or 40 minutes with these people who I've learned so much from, and I want to make sure that as a podcaster, as a storyteller, that we are capturing it all.
And to your point, what emerged from our early conversations and our kind of dynamic working together that I think started to form some of the vision of this season was, as you put it, this really powerful balance between some level of content expertise, right, the fact that I live in this field and have grown up in this field, doing this work each and every day, and your talents and skills around storytelling. And what I think I learned very early on in our conversation is that we value preparation when it comes to this work in particular. We worked very hard to prepare the flow of the conversation with each of our guests. The questions were not only pointed, but the feedback from our partners when we received it was reflected in those questions and in that conversation, and so preparation was really important to both of us.
What you taught me and what I learned from you very early on is that you've done the preparation, you've got the right questions, you're going to elicit the content and the stories that you want from these guests. Now live in the story, be part of the story, allow the story to develop, and don't get so fixated on the next question. Be present in the conversation, and hear the stories, and so that for me was really critical, and I think in many ways is what led to the first inkling that this season was going to have the flavor that it ultimately started to have,
Nathan Fink 11:03
yeah. Well, I think that's a really great observation. I actually remember that because of our preparation was so deep, there was this moment of us saying, now remember, be in the conversation you're in. You know, my history goes back, I was a jazz musician for a while, I thought that's what I would be in life for a bit, and I used to actually do a lot of studying of Charlie Parker and things, and one of the things that I loved that Charlie Parker said in an interview was, if you had to practice one song, just one for your whole life, what would you play. And his response wasn't a song, it was scales, and he said, because when I get up on stage, I then forget everything I practiced, because I now live in it, and so for interviewing, I love this concept, because at the end of the day, the question you want to ask is not as important as the thing being said, so be there for it.
Luke Waldo 12:02
I this weekend was listening to a podcast, because that's what I do when I'm not, when I'm not recording a podcast, and I learned of a jazz musician I was not aware of. I'm not, I'm not a big jazz guy, I can enjoy it, but I don't get it. But I discovered Keith Jarrett, and the story about a concert that he held in Cologne, Germany, in 1975 and he's a jazz pianist. He shows up to Cologne, apparently after a long, long trip, back is sore, not feeling well, and he was performing at the opera house, sold out show, and had asked for a particular grand piano, that's what he played on, and he gets there, and there's the promoter is a 17 year old young woman who did not have a grand piano, and in fact only had a grand baby piano that had broken pedals and was out of tune, and he protested. He said, "I can't, I can't play on this. I'm not feeling well. And on top of it, you're giving me an instrument that doesn't work. And she pleaded with him.
He ends up playing, and because of the nature of this semi-broken piano, and he was an improvisational pianist in the first place, but he had to work with what he had in front of him, and he got into his flow, and it turns out it ends up being the most sold solo jazz album in jazz history, because he found his flow, he found the story that had to be told on this piano that was in front of him, right, and the conditions that, that, that kind of emerged, and I just found it really fascinating, to your point, that we, we have learned so much in this season, because in many ways we've done the preparation right, like Keith Jarrett had done the preparation. He's clearly a great pianist, he knows how to play his piano, but the stories that kind of emerge as we get into it are at times unpredictable, and I think we allowed that to happen as we started this season, and we'll get into, obviously, the composition of this season, which also started to tell its own story as we got further into it.
Nathan Fink 14:32
So, it is of note that I am your broken piano.
Luke Waldo 14:35
Well, I again, because of that I think it brought out parts of me that had likely been dormant for a long time, right. I think that's part of what this season has taught me a lot, is that, and we'll get into a lot of what Jess Moyer has taught us, others who have talked a lot about it's not an either or, it's a both and, right, it's the science of storytelling, it's the art of storytelling. You need to bring them together, and you've really allowed me to bring back that storytelling side of, of my not only myself, but the passion that I have for this work, that oftentimes can get buried when you are so immersed in the data and the research and the science of our work.
Nathan Fink 15:20
So, if that is in fact the premise of this, that we are reawakening, we've got this kind of out of tune, maybe missing a key or two, and we're playing together at some point in the conversations that we were recording for The Shift, season four of Overloaded begins to take shape in your mind. How does that start to emerge?
Luke Waldo 15:45
So, I think it's important that we clarify with our listeners that when you and I started recording with our guests in Portland, those were standalone interviews with really profound change makers that we've mentioned here. There was no, there was no designed theme, right, connective tissue between those interviews, necessarily. Right, these are people, right, giants in our field, but Desmond Meade, right, Desmond Meade is an organizer. He, his focus was on voting rights. Dr. Bruce Perry, right, is, you know, very, very immersed in clinical psychology and brain science and early childhood. We had Anessa Hartman, who is a state representative, right. These, these people weren't telling the same story, but what I heard in almost all of our conversations were the stories we tell ourselves, right. So, Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, in particular, said exactly those words,
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris 16:43
Correct. And let me tell you one of these stories that we've been telling ourselves.
Luke Waldo 16:50
And what I heard in those moments from many of them. Anessa Hartman is another that comes to mind, Desmond Meade, the kind of us versus them. It's that we've got these narratives, these stories that we tell ourselves that keep us stuck, that blind us from the light of possibility, right? That is around us, and we have - we've been telling the wrong stories, right? We've been playing the wrong song, in my opinion, for too long. We have so much data, so much evidence in our fields, right? The brain science that tells us that when this sort of toxic stimuli hits us, it harms us. When all this positive stimuli, right, you know, nurturing relationships, kindness, friendships, generosity, compassion, it heals us, and it grows our possibilities, and we've been telling too many of these stories where we're allowing the brokenness of the piano to be the sound that resonates through our society, through our work.
And I started to hear from them after they talked about those stories that we tell ourselves that are about the brokenness, that on the other side of that story was one of healing, generosity, kindness, compassion, redemption, and that we needed, we needed to find a way to tell that story to elevate that story, and so that's where I started to hear it really emerge for this season to start to come together, and I just want to make a quick note that that that didn't happen by accident, right? This was certainly in the back of my mind, because Overloaded is a reflection of our Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative, and this this last year we started to really look at, you know, if we're not, if we're not challenging some of these harmful mental models, right, the fatalism, the individualism, right, the bad parent or bad apple type mental models, we can have all the best data in the world. If we're not telling stories that counteract and challenge those mental models, we're just going to be spinning our wheels.
Nathan Fink 19:00
And so that was in the back of my mind, and Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, and Annessa Hartman, and Desmond Meade, and all of these really powerful speakers started to tell that story for me, which clicked. When we talk about telling stories, sometimes we talk about stories that create problem, and then we start talking about stories that create opposition to problem, and then here walks Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, and says, and this is where my brain exploded. The code card.
Dr. Nadine Burke Harris 19:28
When you're a medical trainee and you start your first day of residency, the first thing they give you is a code card, what to do if a patient goes into cardio respiratory arrest, and the idea there is that when something super stressful is happening, right, or when you have this full activation, that it's really helpful. We do a lot better when we have a framework to fall back on.
Nathan Fink 19:49
I love that moment, because as she described, that a code card is something that a first year medical student carries to take a response that is not natural to them, right,and the code card is based on this idea that if practiced enough, we can change the course of our response. That response that we would normally have is actually a long form story that is sometimes in the form of systems, sometimes in the form of information, and the code card introduces an alternate reality that we can embed, and so we'd start telling those stories, and this goes back to now Tshaka and Sam.
Tshaka Barrows 20:35
Last shout out is, if you can find videos or movies of humans winning, please send them our way. We think there's a real shortage of examples of us figuring ourselves out.
Nathan Fink 20:47
At some point in our separate journeys of these light bulbs. There was this moment that you and I both thought we need Jess Moyer.
Luke Waldo 20:57
Yeah, you beat me to it. I was just about to say, right? The code card leads to Jess Moyer.
Nathan Fink 21:02
So why though? What is it about Jess Moyer?
Luke Waldo 21:05
Because I think you articulated it extremely well with the code card, right? Is that anybody that's listened to this podcast for the last now four full seasons knows that I can talk, I can tell stories endlessly, and stories are powerful, even one-off stories are powerful. However, what I learned from the code card, what I knew right from my own experience in some of this work, but had not - I don't think I'd internalized it as much as I needed to - is that if we're really going to change the narrative, we can change the narrative from parents who neglect their children to parents who are overloaded by stress that interrupts their ability to care for their children the way they want to. We have to practice, right? We have to create a code card of sorts. We have to be able to articulate that story over and over and over again. It requires discipline.
I can tell stories. I don't always have the discipline to tell the stories in a way that's going to start to really embed itself at a cellular level for the people I'm trying to, trying to again we've, we've used words like convince or persuade. Jess Moyer talks about tilling the soil, right? How do we till the soil? The possibility of new growth, right? Is there, and so, yeah, I think it was first of all our conversations with Jess Moyer from the Frameworks Institute made it very clear to me that Jess was the messenger, she was the co-pilot for this season. I've said this before in this podcast, I don't know that I have this season, but Overloaded, the title of this podcast comes from the Frameworks Institute, and their work with Prevent Child Abuse America in their reporting on reframing childhood adversity. So our work with frameworks goes way back.
I got to know Jess in the summer of 2025 and it became very clear to me that she was going to be able to help us, help me, our team at the Institute, really start to develop the discipline and the practice and the muscle to change the narrative through repetition, right through targeted messaging and communication, and so that was really the aha moment. That okay, we need, we need Jess, we need Frameworks, we need an expert, a resident expert on this season, help pull it all together and guide us in the right direction.
Nathan Fink 23:37
Yeah, well, you do, in this is to Jess' skill, Frameworks Institute’s skill, you do need to name the thing sometimes to be able to see it right, so you break apart the machine, see the pieces, and that dominant narratives dominate because they are accumulation over time, and that accumulation is almost like the waves of an ocean, you just stop hearing the sound, right?
I think practically speaking, we thought we needed to break this machine apart, see what it's made of, see how it functions, see what it delivers, and then we needed to decide on the shape it would take in terms of an actual podcast, how are we presenting this to the world? Because what we don't want to do is, if it bleeds, it leads, it's not news if the plane lands on time. We come from a society that is used to only responding when the pressure is so much we can't ignore it, but now we're thinking about how do we build something where there isn't pressure, or there's a valve.
Luke Waldo 24:49
That in many ways has always been the formula for this podcast, making sense of the problem, right, the underlying kind of root causes of neglect. Right, but then to your point, right, not leaving people in the darkness of the problem, but showing the possibility of solutions to those problems, right. And so that was really season two, was starting to demonstrate, you know, growth is breaking through in season one. Ashlee Jackson, who works here at Children's and has worked in our child welfare system, talks about the rose that grows through the crack in the sidewalk, and I think we want to be able to demonstrate that there are solutions, there are pathways from the dark to the light, and I saw it no different with this season, right? Is there's the stories we tell ourselves, right, the headlines, the if it bleeds it leads, the very polarized, the very adversarial kind of conversations that are happening in our country, in our, in our politics, in our society, even in our field, that we need to both name the problem, we need to elevate that problem, right? As, as Rinku Sen shared with us, right, we have to, we have to be able to polarize narratives.
Rinku Sen 26:12
We cannot meet polarizing narratives with entirely non-polarizing narratives, because we are making choices about people's lives based on our values and if unification is the only goal we can easily unify around some very limited choices that have terrible consequences for people.
Luke Waldo 26:38
it's, you know, in some ways one thing or the other, right? And what is in this case the problem, and what are in our cases, or in our case, when it came to developing the season, what are the better narratives? What is the better way, right? How do we show that? How do we, how do we tell that story that brings us to a better place?
Nathan Fink 27:00
When you look back, then thinking what this quick journey we've just been through, what are the standout episodes?
Luke Waldo 27:10
Well, it's like trying to, you know, pick your favorite kid, man. So, one, I think we, we should very quickly reflect on the fact that, as, as was the case with season one of this podcast, we did not design the podcast from the beginning to be both feature episodes with standalone interviews with some of our change makers, and the odd episodes are all what I call, continue to call, our collage episodes, right, or are more of our narrative, and then even episodes are our feature standalone episodes. We did not design that from the beginning, right. We had whatever it was, 12, 13, 14, interviews with tremendous change makers, so a couple of my episodes I did not perceive even happening, like episode seven, right.
Episode seven is the focus on the science and art of storytelling, and that was because we had these incredible conversations with Megan McGee from Ex Fabula, with Rinku Sen from the Narrative Initiative, Tarik Moody from Radio Milwaukee, who come from very different backgrounds and perspectives, but told us these just amazing, powerful approaches to storytelling, and when we put it together, and when you, you know, used your wizardry of not only pulling these stories together in a way that flowed and you know contrasted enough to kind of like, make you think differently about how many different ways we can approach storytelling.
And then on top of that, bringing in Dr. Uri Hasson, who Megan McGee had talked about, that then brought his own voice into it. For me, it was a marvel of, the marvel of podcasting, right? It's just the beauty of storytelling, it's what, what attracted me to podcasting in the first place, right? This American Life, or, you know, Radiolab approach to storytelling that I find so compelling. So, in many ways, kudos to you for making episode seven arguably my favorite episode of all four seasons of the podcast, and it's just because of, in many ways, the artistry and storytelling that happened within that episode. And episode nine, which you beautifully coined as the Chicago Stranger Things episode. You know, I knew that I had people on this season that were going to talk about food, Emerald Mills Williams. Her her work is centered around dialogue through food, right, breaking bad bread together, but I didn't expect it to be so prominent in so many conversations, so in many ways, right, you know, Rinki Sen, Tarik Moody, Shary Tran had talked so much about, look, if we really want to get back to connecting with people, because the reality is, as Rinku Sen said, people aren't going to change the way they think, are not going to be available to your narrative or your message if you don't have a relationship with them. You can be Oprah Winfrey, as she put it, if you don't have those relationships, your narrative is going to fall flat.
And all of them talked about there is no greater way to bring people's walls down to open each other's hearts than through food. And so I think that episode was a reminder to me that while there is science practice discipline that is very necessary, it's a huge takeaway from the season, as Jessica Moyer and others have taught us that we also can't do this work without getting back to our humanity, our shared humanity, identifying shared values, and you know, most people find a shared value in congregating around food.
Nathan Fink 31:04
And I think what you're talking about, if we were to step back from food as a component of this, is nourishment, and I think that's where we have diverged over these last, let's call it this last decade, right, we've found reasons to disengage, and in doing that, we are less nourished because we are not in relationship with either a moment or people or breaking bread, like you said, which is of course nourishing, and I think that's where, and you have identified this, because we have our interview sets, then we have these collage sets, and if you notice, five, seven, and nine, they are doing something else, and again, that's where you and I internally understood that at that moment we were diverging from the shift content, those interviews in place of something else. When I listen to five with Valerie Frost or Megan McGee, seven, Ex Fabula, nine Tarik Moody, Shary Tran, Emerald Williams. They say to us in kind of that nourishing way, I'm not going to tell you anymore, I'm going to show you, and when I show you, I'm taking you with me in that we are going to give you a person's experience.
Valerie Frost 32:22
Because I now know for the rest of my life that I don't, I don't really have anything.
Nathan Fink 32:28
It's going to be surrounded with music.
Valerie Frost 32:30
I don't have anything right now on this call. CPS could come knock on my door, they could go pick my kids up from the school.
Nathan Fink 32:36
There's going to be ambient sound, and we are bringing receipts.
Media Clip 32:40
CPS investigations run 60 days at least, with investigators pulling children out of school and keeping families apart, families already living on the edge.
Nathan Fink 32:59
I think, though, that this podcast then goes back to this example of what Jess had said, we can't be afraid to try anymore, and I'm proud of us for that, because inherently in spots we have gotten it wrong, and trying is about being in relationship,
Luke Waldo 33:20
Yeah, it makes me think a lot about there's two people that come to mind from the season when you talked about one trying and two really centering the relationship in many ways before the message, before the narrative, and that first person is Rinku Sen, who talks a lot about, like, look, we can't, we can't just spend months and months crafting our message,
Rinku Sen 33:43
if our practice is to wait for a words that work memo from quote unquote our side, that's not gonna do it.
Luke Waldo 33:52
Because the time may pass right for that message to have resonated and connected with people, but on the other side is certainly Desmond Meade, when it comes to relationships, he was very explicit in his campaign that this was not going to be political, that this was about his life as a convicted felon who did not have his voting rights, and the 1.4 million Floridians who walked side by side with him to show their humanity to their communities, didn't matter if they were on the right or on the left or in the center. He would go from community to community and ask the same question,
Desmond Meade 34:35
Do you know anyone who you love who's ever made a mistake?
Luke Waldo 34:39
And connected it back to every single person that he connected with, connecting it back to their, their loved ones, right, their own lives, to say, you know what, we've made mistakes, we are, we are, we are trying to do better and be better, and we start by having voice again in our community, right. And so I think you're absolutely right. It's, it's this season has been for me a journey through the messiness, the richness, the humanness of storytelling to get to a place where we can develop enough muscle and enough discipline and be able to tell the right story at the right time of the quote unquote right people, right to the people we have connected with, we've, we've built trust with who are open to that story, so yeah, it's been, it's been fascinating. There's this journey will continue long after the season, because the practicing in many ways, now begins.
Nathan Fink 35:42
The Desmond Meade quote really stands out to me, especially in this moment, because I think what we're getting to is, if the answer to that question is me, I have you have now essentially admitted that the tracks you're standing on, they don't have to be your fault. This is about looking up and saying no, I can be part of the solution, but to do that we've got to go back to Prudence Beidler Carr. We've got to go back to the origins of these systems. So, when we break apart this machine, and I mentioned her specifically, because we do have to understand that the system that is supposed to meet that need when asked was not built or designed with the intention to do that thing.
Prudence Beidler Carr 36:30
We've essentially created a mechanism for determining that a child who was living in a home where the parents were found unfit, not because they've abused their child, not because there's an imminent risk of harm, but because the parents sought help, were rejected from that help, and now unfit to care for their child, so their child is removed from their care.
Nathan Fink 36:55
That startled me, because the story that Valerie Frost tells, I feel, is tracing paper away from being my story.
Luke Waldo 37:05
Yeah, so Nathan, I want to take a moment to acknowledge not only the relationship that we've developed through this season, but also to acknowledge more concretely the opportunities, the doors that you opened to me and to the Overloaded Podcast, when it comes to your skill set and your vision around storytelling, that includes bringing in media clips, clips from movies, pop culture, that really help us tell the story about these kind of cultural mindsets, right, that are, as Jess Moyer tells us, in many cases invisible to us, right, and that's the part of the season that nobody but you and me has seen. The behind the scenes conversations that you and I would have every week as we constructed these episodes, particularly the odd numbered episodes, our collage episodes, where we're pulling together a lot of our different speakers, and they're referring to moments in time like some of our more recent kind of political, potentially more socially controversial moments that narrative had a part to play in, right, because you really, you really brought a level of texture and brought to life a lot of these concepts and ideas in a way that I wasn't able to in the past.
So, with that, I want to explore a little bit of what people don't see in the behind the scenes, and some of the really hard decisions and hard conversations I think that you and I had when it came to the construction of the season, particularly when it came to clips outside of right, the interviews themselves. Yeah, we had a number of moments that were inherently political, in one case, much of our conversation with Rinku Sen, right, was about historical social movements. Historical social movements often involve politics and policy, and she, in particular, talked about the recent work that they had done during the Obama administration around family separation that included immigration and child welfare, and you, after having worked together for half a season already, I trusted you to bring in the kind of media clips that would really help illustrate, right, and give voice to those moments, and you included a very intense, very powerful news clip that included an immigration raid.
Shattered Families Media Clip 39:51
One more in August 2010 federal agents stormed the home of Clara and Josefina, two sisters raising their three small children together.
Luke Waldo 40:01
And I'll be honest with you, and I think I told you this at the time when I was first listening to the first version, the first clip. It startled me. In fact, it scared me a bit. I remember being at my desk and almost jumping out of my chair, and so it was my first instinct was to let you know this scared me, and it might be too much, and we had a conversation, so I want to flip it back to you before I share a little bit of kind of my own conclusion as to how we ultimately resolved this moment, but I want to know kind of your thought behind that process and how we got here.
Nathan Fink 40:38
Thanks for the question. That clip was from 2012 from the Shattered Families. Right, so when I started to work with the clip itself, we were in the throes of ice raids in Minneapolis,
Luke Waldo 40:54
Right.
Nathan Fink 40:54
Okay, so this clip to me is a clip that marks time differently,
Luke Waldo 41:01
Right.
Nathan Fink 41:02
And at that time, this was during the Obama era. This was a wildly unacceptable clip to have heard, and you had, I think, a sensitized reaction. And meanwhile, my reaction was completely desensitized to this, because I'm trying to essentially walk us through an experience that gets our attention, and our attention has been so stretched. The other thing, though, that I want to point out is just how far these goal posts have moved over the last decade. Right, so for this podcast, then we do need to acknowledge the current environment, and then we don't want to platform the things that we're trying to change, but I also think we have to be honest with ourselves with the distance traveled by virtue of current culture, you know.
Luke Waldo 41:50
And this, you make an important point, and this is kind of couched in a bigger conversation that we had had, I think, right before this about how political or not political should this season be? Right, and because we had made some other choices, which we can get into in a moment, where we had removed certain current politicians from, I think, the previous episode, if not episode eight itself, right? It was, it was certainly related to Rinku's conversation, and for me, this was not at the end of the day political.
What my reaction was, as you pointed out, it was highly sensitized, and it was in response to what was happening in Minneapolis. I have lots of friends, close friends that live in Minneapolis. It was very personal for them, obviously very, very personal for me, and I went into my kind of helper and healer space, and went, is this going to cause harm? Right, there are people that are being actively traumatized right now in Minneapolis because of exactly what we're hearing in this clip, and do I want to expose friends, family, any of our audience who might be right empathetic to what is happening in Minneapolis to this sort of intensity and and potentially kind of traumatizing moment right. So it was that it was less about the you know politics necessarily of the moment and and when you and I then had that conversation which is much like what we're having right now.
It became very clear to me that, especially in the context of Rinku Sen's lessons that she was giving us, we had to present it because it was a polarizing moment, right? It was. We have a choice here, right? We can either stand by and accept that families should be forcibly separated, or we need to provide a different - in our case, what we believe is a better narrative, which is families can be kept together and immigration can still be enforced in a reasonable, legal, humane way, right? And so you and I had that conversation. What I had suggested was, can we bring the volume down a bit, because I don't, I don't want anybody else to nearly fall out of their chair, or you know, swerve off the road when they're listening to this in their, in their car.
Nathan Fink 44:14
And think about this, though, too, in the context of this particular podcast. This particular podcast is meant to speak to the dominant narrative about other choices, so to platform non-dominant narratives for the betterment of us all, right? Even if that, you know, the listeners of this podcast might be varied, diverse, all of that. We still, as a group, through our systems, through our services, are platforming the dominant narrative, because they're built out of the dominant narrative. So, for me, when I look at that, I think, okay, you have to speak with people, then not at them, right? You can speak to them, but if you're speaking at them. So that is a different thing, and Rinku Sen says that repeatedly.
Rinku Sen 45:04
It doesn't matter if you're Oprah or your grandma, no one is listening to either one without feeling like there's a relationship here, and this person cares about me.
Nathan Fink 45:16
If that is our platform for this podcast, we actually have to make choices that will keep listeners who have held the dominant narrative, maybe unwittingly or unconsciously. We have to keep them with us, right? Yeah. So, your question is, I think, based in this idea, for me, will that throw my mom? Is she still with me? Is she still having the conversation with me now? My mother and I diverge politically, you know, and this is something that has happened more and more over the years, but I think that choice, that idea is also kind of what is the narrative that we want to platform.
Luke Waldo 45:58
Yeah, and I think that's where, when we did ultimately decide to keep certain political figures, right, we, you hear President Obama's voice in this season of the podcast, in particular when he is acknowledging there needed to be changes at a policy level at DHS, right, but we did at the same time remove at least one speaker from the current administration who was making very dehumanizing comments about the same immigrant population, right, the immigrant families that Obama was talking about just a decade earlier, right, and to your point, that was a choice, and that was a choice based on lessons that I had learned from Rinku Sen and Jess Moyer and other speakers this season, and you've already pointed this out, but I'll say it again, I especially in a rage-build algorithmic society that we have now, where rage plays much better in our social media feeds, in our, for that matter, our newscasts, we have to platform narratives that are showing a reality that many people are not even hearing or seeing, right, if, if, if we're talking about your, your mother, or, right, our friends or neighbors who are watching a different newscast, they may not have heard right the stories that we are trying to tell on the season of the podcast, and and the other, the other point that Megan McGee and Rinku also talk about, Jess Moyer talks about this season is that when we lead with things that incite rage or fear or anger, we put people in their survival brain, their impulsive brain, and we can follow with the best, better narrative after that first initial kind of rage, rage-baiting comment or clip, but they're not available for it, right? They're, they're just not, they're, they're not in the right brain to hear, to absorb, and to integrate, right, the lessons of that better narrative, and that, and that's what I've learned as a core lesson of this season, is we need people to be available, right, to these these alternative narratives to really challenge those harmful narratives.
Nathan Fink 48:26
Well, you know, it's it strikes me that where we exist now, our amygdalas are inflamed. Okay, right, we are in fight or flight constantly, and so what we're doing, because the amount of information we take in, even in our podcast, just like this one, we are screening constantly. Are you attacking me? Do I have to run from this? Do I have to fight this? Are you talking about me? Right, like we just process non stop, and so kind of that nourishment that I reflected on earlier, and you know, even, even my mother, these are putting people in place of that kind of firing of the amygdala, so we're remembering that, listen, people live here, they listen here, they feel here, and what we're talking about is that we have to make sure that we're saying we are not blaming you, we are actually bringing this to us, because this is happening to us. This is our society. The stories we tell dictate the society we're going to live in. Right to that point, then I think that the screening of specific narratives that we wanted to talk about, the arrangement of how we talked about it, so to be very careful that we are not blaming people who are talking about something as a society we want to be aware of, so we can make. Intentional choices was really the through line, but I'll tell you, there's times where you know you and I had conversations about, is this actually abdicating a responsibility,
Luke Waldo 50:14
So you know, I again, I want to go back to, you know, the this season I really tried to be incredibly present in the conversations as a student, right, because a lot of this is, as I discussed earlier in our conversation, you and I are both, we've been given the gift of gab, I am, I can talk all day long, stream of consciousness, and I get along really well, and I believe I can tell good stories. I can frame up right the challenges that we face in the, in this very complex world of humanity in ways that are compelling and engaging. However, I don't have, didn't have the discipline to be able to tell these stories more effectively and in a way that is really going to start to kind of till the soil, right, as Jess Moyer shared.
So, with that said, you know, one thing that really resonated with me in our conversations, particularly with our narrative experts like Rinku and Jess, Megan McGee, and others, is this idea that even if you're not telling the story of the dominant narrative, even if you're not talking about those in power, right, those that have been the headline, is you know, as long as we can remember, they're going to creep in, they're going to show up anyways, and so if I'm starting to tell the story right of the overloaded mother who shows up at an appointment disheveled, as Valerie Frost illustrated in her conversation with me, you know, there's already just by telling that story, even in a positive light, for a lot of people, right, that's going to draw certain dominant mental models for them right away, and so through that kind of conversation and that learning process recognized that we to start to degrade some of those dominant harmful narratives, we do have to continue to platform, we have to center right those that have been invisible, right, the Shary Tran in her, in her storytelling of, of being one of three, right, Asian Americans in the room, right.
How do we start to platform that story, that narrative, and do so in a positive manner from a, from a place of strength, a place of hope, a place of inspiration, right, because frankly, the alternative story that we may or may not be true is going to surface for people anyways, and now we're trying to put that in the background and put in the foreground the people that have not been seen or have been seen in the wrong light, right, or have been judged right unfairly, so yeah, I thought that was for me a really critical learning piece of this of this season is that contrast is not necessarily my responsibility any anymore, and I can tell somebody's story without having to give all of the background and the full context for people to understand it, yeah. Does that make sense?
Nathan Fink 53:26
It does. And you know what you just said brought up a memory from the season for me, which was when Shary Tran and you and I made you ask this question. I remember the K-Pop Demon Hunters question. Oh, yeah.
Movie Clip 53:43
50,000 fans are waiting for you.
Shary Tran 53:47
You know, first and foremost, I love K-Pop Demon Hunters, and I'm glad you brought it up, because wow, what.. what an amazing experience it would have been for me, as like a 10 year old Shary, to see myself on the screen and seeing every little girl in the community wanting to meet me for Halloween.
Nathan Fink 54:04
What would it be like to watch people dress like you for Halloween? Right, dress like the culture that you were either ashamed of because of food smells, which we brought those clips up to, but just to feel so invisible that you would celebrate watching someone even briefly want to be like you. I'm from the dominant culture, right? I'm a male, like it doesn't get more privileged than where I come from. So, when I think about the fact that people dream about that, they would have been different had people dressed like them for Halloween, and then I realized that's what my son went as for Halloween, and that if SharyTran, if a young SharyTran could have been a part of that trick-or-treating, who knows what her ceiling would have been like from an emotional perspective, that that is actually. The conversation that we're platforming is people's growth potential.
Luke Waldo 55:05
Yeah, no, 100% And we've talked a lot about this, as you know, and grappled with this idea of are we are we manipulating our audience right by telling the story this way, right? And and I just, you know, when I thought about that for this conversation, you know, again, I go back to this idea that, again, the powerful don't need my help in centering them, right? They live on the front pages, they're in our feeds, they control, right, oftentimes the narratives that reinforce their worldview. So, shifting the narrative, not only to those who don't have power, right, again, the overloaded mother or the neighborhood who has been devastated by disinvestment, but, but also to their strengths, their hopes, their dreams. That's not from my perspective, that's not manipulation, it's simply recognition of their many superpowers, right, that have been overshadowed by these simple reductive headlines and dominant narratives that Claudia Road talked about, right, the monster narratives, the sociopaths, the freeloaders, right, these, these, these simple reductive kind of narratives that completely shroud us from the incredible superpowers that so many people who are struggling still, still have, and almost especially have, because they have so much more to overcome than those of us that have been dealt the hand of privilege.
Nathan Fink 56:30
I'm so glad you platform it that way, because even the word manipulation shows how deeply this is embedded in the way the stories we tell ourselves. You know, we think that we are manipulating people by telling a different narrative like that, is shows us how kind of I don't want to call it insidious, because these are big words, right, like manipulation insidious, but how deep it goes through us culturally that we won't just say it's telling a narrative, we actually have to debate whether or not it's manipulation, because we've just eat, we eat the stories we've been told so often, we're just used to the flavor, and then, and maybe this is you and I going back with our midwestern roots to be like, wait, where do I put shame in here in my decision making, where it's not necessarily manipulation, in fact it's not even close, it's information, and then with that in mind, like look at Pardeep's story, so again another place in a series of choices with Pardeep's story is so shocking to me, in that one, my mother-in-law is from Oak Creek, I know that temple, and so all of a sudden you invite this person onto the podcast, and I live in New Hampshire now, so I'm 1000s of miles away from this incident, and all of a sudden I'm listening to him explain how he came to befriend and go on tour with a former white supremacist and have these conversations, have arguments with this person, and then to have to articulate for a group why he did that, why it's important to healing, and then in my head I'm fighting against this black and white existence.
We live so black and white in these conversations that we want to call it a great evil or a great love, and there's no space between for reflection, and then here comes Pardeep to say not only did I witness a tragedy, that tragedy goes back through my family, through my work, through my community, and I'm willing to take that walk beside, and then I guess through the design perspective is like when somebody is sitting with you to tell you that story, and you're like, I'm gonna put that on a podcast. What is our obligation in designing the story itself in such a way that we're doing, we're honoring the effort that it must have taken this human being to walk toward the light while walking somebody home. I mean, these are big things, and it's not just his, it's Valerie Frost. It's living through struggle, it's living through investigation, it's living Desmond Meade. I mean, goodness.
Luke Waldo 59:36
Yeah, so I'm almost embarrassed to admit this, but I'll be honest, as I came into this season, as became clear to me that this season was going to be about narrative change, right? And how do we, how do we design, how do we build better narratives, right? It's kind of a portion of the season, is like, how do we build better narratives? I really approached it, and this is where my kind of institute brain turns on, and I go. So there's a science behind this, right? There's a method I had known of Frameworks Institute's work. We had worked with them in the past, you know. I've watched Megan McGee build Ex Fabula, and kind of the power of coaching budding storytellers, and so on. I was like, let's get deep into the science of building better narratives, right, to challenge mental models to challenge dominant narratives. It didn't occur to me, Nathan, that we wouldn't get very far into the season before it became very clear that if you don't have a relationship with the audience who you want to hear this better narrative to challenge these kind of harmful or these dominant narratives or mental models that keep us stuck, right, that make it hard for us to see, right, these invisible communities, right, or these invisible challenges, or that we are are stuck in this kind of shoulder shrugging of like fatalism, that you know what poor people are always going to be poor, bad parents are always going to be bad parents, they're just always going to be there.
We can't do this work without the relationships, and Pardeep was kind of the, he was the peak of right reaching the top of the mountain, I think, when it came to telling that side of the story, that in many ways Rinku told us, right, she used the Oprah example, right, if you have not kind of connected with people at a human level, they're just not going to buy it, no matter how well you craft that message, and so I think for me, as we went along, it became so much more obvious that the food episode, which again we did not plan at the beginning of the season, is as clearly as it came together, but it became very obvious as that the season developed that we had to focus back in on how do we, as I think party put it, get comfortable in our discomfort sitting together. How do we do as an Emerald shared? How do we do what her grandmother demanded every Sunday for Sunday dinner, which was, you know, what, y'all aren't getting along tough. We're sitting together, we're going to be uncomfortable together, and we're going to talk through it, and we're going to find a way to do and be better. And I think that's a piece that in our work today we've lost sight of it because we're we're only connecting in many ways behind our screens, and that's one of the challenges of this season, is let's get, let's get in front of each other again, and and walk each other home.
Nathan Fink 1:02:34
Yeah, well, that is the great pleasure that I've realized in doing this, and we frame it as get comfortable being uncomfortable, and we put up this kind of like just you're about to have feelings, right? And there is part of me that resists this, because there's this excitement in me that that's actually the humanity we used to know, like that's the relationships we used to be in, and then all of a sudden there's this interceding point of digital everything of algorithmic, like you were calling it anger, outrage, or all these things that have taken us out of our own humanity, and so in doing this season, all of a sudden, in me there has been this great awakening of I get to be in relationships again, and it's complicated, right? These, these scenes you're seeing out of Minneapolis, or this happened up in Maine, where I am, and it's been happening. This is where you live, this is us, right? Right, I guess. What I want people to walk away from the season with is that you get to use what you've heard to actually be in conversations, right? You get to actually try, and I'm so grateful to Jess and so grateful to Rinku and all of the speakers, and even going back to Prudence, we get to ask questions of our systems.
Luke Waldo 1:04:11
Yeah, no, I agree. I think, as I, we kind of wrap on this season, you know, I am deeply grateful going all the way back to our partners, our speakers, our wonderful guests from The Shift at the Prevent Child Abuse America conference, some of my kind of heroes in this field with Dr. Nadine Burke Harris and Dr. Bruce Perry, and being so incredibly inspired by the courage and humility of Desmond Meade and Annessa Hartman, and the incredible work that Tshaka and Sam are doing at the Burns Institute into these really profound conversations that are really unearthing and making clear and visible. Right, the mechanisms, right, the design of those railroad tracks, as Prudence Beidler Carr did for us, and Claudia Rowe did, right, which is this acknowledgement that there are there's a design behind these dominant narratives, and that when we unearth them, when we face them, when we, when we, we make right, make them visible to to all of us, and we recognize, as you pointed out, right, when Tshaka tells us, look, we're all on right, we are on these tracks, and we have, we have a choice today to continue right living on these tracks or designing new tracks, right, that is, that is the like the first core lesson of this season, right.
I'm deeply grateful to those that really kind of grounded us in those dominant narratives, and how we got here, but I then, you know, what for me was really powerful, and I do want to talk just for a moment about, you know, the very seem to be subtle things like the music choice for this season, right, some of the kind of just design of right the ambient background music and sounds to the season that you gave us that really kind of again till the soil, they put us, they put us in this kind of environment that allow us to be present and maybe even set us up to hear things differently, right, because of the chirping of the birds, right, the kind of the budding of spring, right, this kind of hopefulness. It was not accidental, right, but I think that what I'm trying to say here is that, you know, we, we had this really powerful example of how we got here and why dominant narratives are dominant, right, that how they, how they came to be, and then I like to believe that we did good work in working with the powerful storytellers of Rinku and Jessica and Megan McGee and Tarik Moody, and all of these partners who then brought us to there is a different way, and here's how we do it.
We've talked a lot about that today, so I want to exhaust that anymore, and then we came to the to the end about how do we get back to one another to develop these relationships, and you know, in some ways to give, to give really a dignified off ramp, right? Because it's hard, it's hard, even in my field, those that are are willing change makers to recognize that, you know what the system they've been a part of for their entire career was designed in a way that put them in adversarial positions with the people they wanted to help, right. It's hard to acknowledge that, it's hard to, but to be able to give people a dignified off-ramp, and that starts with trust in relationships, right. And when we start to do that effectively, we can start to have really honest conversations about we can all do this better, right? This isn't to put to point fingers, to blame, shout you down, and make an example of you. It's an opportunity for us to build this better narrative together to grow from the soil that we've tilled together, and that for me has been really coalescence, so music.
Nathan Fink 1:08:03
I do remember when I sent you the potential choices, and I remember you having an adverse, quote unquote, and it was because I think out of contexts these things don't make sense, right, because you're imagining like, oh, I want this to be the vibe, but then there is like the conversations that are happening, right, and then there's the thing you're trying to do, which you just named, build trust. So building trust doesn't sound like something, it, it doesn't sound like an aspiration, it sounds more like a familiarity, right? Like, and maybe I'm inventing this, but like, if I hear a beat I've never heard before that makes me feel cool, I don't feel cool most days, right? So I want to be the beat, that's my aspiration, but what I.. but what I need to do is I actually need to be reminded of something that exists for me, so hence these kind of softer, subtle sounds was really where we were aiming, right? And so that was really the inspiration for the music.
Luke Waldo 1:09:18
Well, I really appreciate that, and again, I can't emphasize enough the wizardry, as I often call it, the magic that you dust upon this on this season. Is it's really, it's really remarkable. I think our partnership, the way that we have communicated with one another, our vision, kind of collective vision for this has come together in a way that's wildly exceeded my expectations, and and there's no question, I mean, I listen to a lot of podcasts. The reality is, with a much lesser editor, this season would have been hard to listen to, because. There's so much that you do to cut it up to take a lot of the air out of what I am, you know, trying to describe or react to in the conversations. It's an enormous amount of work, and, and I guess at some level it's it's almost a metaphor for what we're trying to accomplish when we're crafting powerful new better narratives, the better narrative, right?
We have to, we have to be able to tell from our hearts, right, the really visceral human story of the Valerie Frost and the Emerald Mills and the SharyTran and their and their their incredible optimism in the face of really hard stuff, but we also have to take the lessons from this season and craft a better narrative to show that this is something that should live in us, right, that moves us to behave differently, goes to a lot of what Tarik Moody talked about, right. It's like I don't want to just go, "Damn, you know, we're doomed. I want to be moved by, right, a better alternative, because I see that it has changed people's lives. So I want to, you know, again, I want to acknowledge you for that, because you did push me in that space, because I am a lyric guy, right? I love, I love songwriters. So, I, I, music for me is first and foremost the poetry. It's not the right, it's not the instrument, not the instrumental, but there's so much there, there's so many stories in those instruments and in those sounds that I think you brought to life.
Nathan Fink 1:11:43
Yeah, well, what I'll say is this: there is this what now in me, what now, what now? Because there's this hollowness now to have wrapped a season personally, but then there's also this hope. What I hope is that as people listen to this they don't stop, they actually circulate, because this is a conversation, and for it to be powerful, more people have to hear it, because they have to feel it.
Luke Waldo 1:12:19
So I second that. I hope that people will continue to share, will continue to be in conversation around this season, and these episodes. I also hope that they'll reach out. I, you know, I, this is an opportunity to have really constructive discussions with partners, with your teams, with your, your, your friend group. I have produced a lot of supportive materials for this season for ongoing learning, so people should reach out to me, and I would happily share any of those resources. And then, lastly, what's next? I don't know, but I would be remiss if I didn't thank you again for this incredibly just fulfilling and deeply moving season. It's been a real honor working with you, learning from you, being in partnership with you, and I hope that this is the first season of many in our partnership, and we'll see where that takes us. So, thank you again,
Nathan Fink 1:13:32
Thank you. Let this be the beginning, huh?
Luke Waldo 1:13:36
If you enjoyed today's episode, please share with friends, family, and colleagues. Also, leave us a rating or comment so that we can see your reaction and reach more people. This podcast would not have been possible without the support and talents of Nathan Fink, who is responsible for our technical production. I can't express my gratitude enough to Nathan. I'm also grateful to my team at the Institute for Child and Family Well-being at Children's Wisconsin, who drive the Strong Families, Thriving Children, Connected Communities initiative and contributed to the ideas behind this podcast. Finally, I would like to thank all of our speakers that you have heard today and throughout the podcast for their partnership, their willingness to share their stories and expertise with me and all of you, and their commitment to improving the lives of children and families. I'm Luke Waldo, your host and executive editor. Thanks again for listening and see you next time.