Alister Martin

[00:00:00] This podcast is a Roifield Brown production.

[00:00:06] Find others on iTunes.

[00:00:07] All right, yeah!

[00:00:08] Instead of helping companies shrink, I wanted to help them grow.

[00:00:12] In Twin, we say never leave serendipity to chance.

[00:00:14] Mobilizing people is only useful if you can channel it to influence institutions.

[00:00:20] If I want to change that person's mind, it's much more useful for me to find a way to

[00:00:23] have a one-on-one conversation with them.

[00:00:25] And then that becomes this positive loop.

[00:00:28] I wasn't even the smartest kid in my neighborhood.

[00:00:30] One death is a tragedy, ten thousand is a statistic.

[00:00:33] But I was hungry.

[00:00:34] I was really hungry.

[00:00:36] I'm Greg Satell, author of Mapping, Innovation and Cascades.

[00:00:40] And I'm with Roifield Brown, a G-Seph.

[00:00:47] So hey Roifield, this is our second episode.

[00:00:49] We've doubled our number in just one episode.

[00:00:53] We have indeed, we have indeed impressive stats we have.

[00:00:57] Yeah.

[00:00:58] I don't know about you, but I'm getting excellent feedback.

[00:01:01] And that's a good cue to remind our listeners to make sure you subscribe and give five

[00:01:07] stars.

[00:01:08] That is ten stars for me.

[00:01:11] Zero for Roifield.

[00:01:13] So that's an average of five stars.

[00:01:16] Did I give my math right on that one?

[00:01:18] Your math is totally on point on this episode.

[00:01:20] But dear listener, it's incredibly important that you do rate and review this podcast.

[00:01:25] Do it on either Apple Podcast or on Spotify.

[00:01:28] If you mean that more people get to hear Greg's dulcet tones.

[00:01:32] Speaking of math and numbers, I imagine...

[00:01:35] You'd have the nest on the end, Greg.

[00:01:37] Maths.

[00:01:38] But anyway, go on.

[00:01:40] I imagine the maths behind your Mid-Atlantic episode have skyrocketed with all the

[00:01:47] political news on both sides of the Atlantic.

[00:01:51] We did a Kamala special.

[00:01:53] I think we did two.

[00:01:56] And it's much to my shame and shag round that we did a show about Britain being engulfed.

[00:02:03] It really was England being engulfed by these riots at the start of the week.

[00:02:08] And where my bar is, we were kind of in the maelstrom because literally three

[00:02:15] minutes before from my bar, there's a refugee centre, one of the largest in the country.

[00:02:19] And the far right said they were going to demonstrate on Wednesday.

[00:02:24] But the show of anti-racist support all over the country, let alone just round the corner

[00:02:30] here in the Jurisdlaw in Birmingham was truly epic.

[00:02:33] People turned up and were just silent with their banners saying no racism here and it

[00:02:39] happened all over the country as much as us Brits have tarnished our image.

[00:02:44] It's carrying the lead.

[00:02:46] You opened a bar, right?

[00:02:48] What's it called again?

[00:02:49] It's called Temper and Brown.

[00:02:51] And it's in a lovely bit of Birmingham or the Jewelry Quarter.

[00:02:55] It's been over a week and one day.

[00:02:58] So please come down.

[00:02:59] And actually a podcast listener turned up on Sunday and said, I listened to

[00:03:05] Roy Thur's podcast.

[00:03:07] If you don't find yourself in Birmingham, the Mid-Atlantic podcast actually is great.

[00:03:12] It examines politics on both sides of the Atlantic in the UK and in the US from

[00:03:18] like a centre-left perspective.

[00:03:21] So, you know, if you have Bernie Sanders on one side and like Shay Gavara and

[00:03:27] Abby Hopkin on the other, it's somewhere in the centre.

[00:03:32] Anyway, I was hoping our next guest could sort of elevate you a little bit

[00:03:38] because, you know, politics isn't just about left and right, but also using

[00:03:43] institutions to service people.

[00:03:46] And that's exactly what Alistair Martin does.

[00:03:50] He's really a great guy that I have to warn you.

[00:03:53] He's got a resume that really makes you want to kind of puke.

[00:03:57] I mean, he's a medical doctor, which is, you know, the dream of every Jewish

[00:04:01] mother. So I hope my mother isn't listening.

[00:04:04] But in addition to being a medical doctor, he is a Harvard professor at not

[00:04:11] only the medical school, but also the Kennedy School of Government.

[00:04:15] Absolutely amazing what he's accomplished is still, well, compared to

[00:04:19] you and me, a relatively young man came up a little rough, had some left turns.

[00:04:25] It's an incredible story.

[00:04:27] So don't embarrass me.

[00:04:30] Sometimes he's quite a funny guy.

[00:04:34] Hey, Alistair.

[00:04:36] Thanks.

[00:04:37] Thanks for joining us.

[00:04:38] Oh, it's great to see you.

[00:04:39] Thank you for having me, Greg and Roy Field.

[00:04:41] Very nice to meet you.

[00:04:43] Likewise, sir.

[00:04:44] Alistair, could you tell us a little bit about what you're doing?

[00:04:47] Because I can never keep track.

[00:04:50] You are an emergency room doctor, which is a full time job last time I checked.

[00:04:55] You were a White House fellow.

[00:04:57] You work at both Harvard Kennedy School.

[00:05:00] And the medical school.

[00:05:02] And as well, you are involved with a number of nonprofits which you

[00:05:09] founded in Ram.

[00:05:11] Is that right?

[00:05:12] That's right.

[00:05:13] That's right.

[00:05:13] Great.

[00:05:14] How do you do all that stuff?

[00:05:15] Because the emergency room is a full time thing, right?

[00:05:19] And then the big one you do is a healthier democracy and vote ER.

[00:05:25] Could you tell us a little bit about that?

[00:05:27] Yeah.

[00:05:28] It's a really great question, Greg.

[00:05:30] For those of you who are listening, who've been to an emergency room recently,

[00:05:35] first of all, I'm sorry.

[00:05:36] But if you've been to an emergency room recently, you understand that the

[00:05:42] emergency room is not just a place for addressing the medical emergencies.

[00:05:48] The gunshot wounds, the strokes, the heart attacks.

[00:05:51] In the United States, what we see in emergency rooms all across

[00:05:55] the country are also the public policy emergencies.

[00:05:59] The young mom of two who needs a work note to get back to work and doesn't have

[00:06:03] anywhere else to go.

[00:06:04] The homeless man I just saw on my last overnight shift, who came to the

[00:06:09] ER on his birthday because he didn't want to be alone and hungry on his

[00:06:13] birthday.

[00:06:14] The young 20-something year old I saw with abdominal pain who didn't

[00:06:19] have appendicitis, wasn't pregnant, didn't have a use of a

[00:06:22] UTI, but had something called starvation ketosis.

[00:06:25] This young woman was in the emergency room with abdominal pain because she was

[00:06:29] hungry.

[00:06:31] Okay.

[00:06:32] This is what we see on a night and basis in the emergency room in this

[00:06:35] country.

[00:06:36] And I think you can only see that kind of suffering for so long as an ER doctor,

[00:06:42] as an ER nurse, as a clinical provider before you have one of two options.

[00:06:48] You can decide that the problems are much bigger than you and it's

[00:06:54] hopeless to get involved or you try and figure out what little piece of this

[00:07:01] can I make better before I leave.

[00:07:04] Right?

[00:07:04] What little part of this work can I address and leave the healthcare

[00:07:08] system better than I found it?

[00:07:10] And that's really what my work is, where I guess I'm an ER doctor but

[00:07:14] I also understand that many of the problems that my patients face,

[00:07:18] the issue that caused them to come to ER in the first place is way upstream.

[00:07:23] And just as I'm committed to helping the individual patient in front of me,

[00:07:27] I've got to be committed to trying to address some of the upstream

[00:07:30] public policy failings that our patients suffer from and that's the

[00:07:34] work we do at A Healthier Democracy.

[00:07:36] We have initiatives and programs that address key issues around

[00:07:40] addiction, access issues around voter participation, issues around

[00:07:44] economic inequality.

[00:07:46] And so it's this ability to zoom in at the individual level and zoom out

[00:07:49] at the system level that I think really inspires the work I do.

[00:07:54] Yeah, we don't talk enough about the social determinants of care.

[00:07:58] It's really difficult to be healthy if you don't have a stable place

[00:08:03] to live, if you don't have a good diet, if you don't have a good diet,

[00:08:09] if you don't have stable relationships, it takes a physical toll.

[00:08:15] But you're one of those people I look at and just think, wow, that guy's done

[00:08:20] everything right in his life.

[00:08:23] But actually when you were 17, 18, it took a left turn.

[00:08:31] Yeah, yeah, I think first of all, Greg, I think the same about you.

[00:08:35] And if you haven't bought the Cascades book, make sure you do.

[00:08:38] Make sure you do.

[00:08:39] She looks like.

[00:08:40] Tell it to my wife.

[00:08:42] Get the audible version actually.

[00:08:44] The reality is that the reason I do what I do is because come from a low-income

[00:08:48] community where I saw the impact of the emergency room and the fact that

[00:08:54] it is for some patients, the only option that they have, it's the Ellis Island

[00:08:58] of, I would argue, not just our healthcare system of our society.

[00:09:02] Everybody has to pass through our healthcare system and the emergency room

[00:09:05] is really at the front end of that.

[00:09:08] But yeah, I hit a rough patch when I was in my senior year of high school.

[00:09:12] Was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got involved in a gang incident.

[00:09:16] I was not being related at all.

[00:09:19] I was a prideful and let's put this way, I thought I could save the day.

[00:09:25] A friend of an acquaintance of mine was getting jumped and I was

[00:09:29] a third degree black belt in Taekwondo and I thought I could Bruce Lee.

[00:09:34] Bruce Lee is way out of the situation and it didn't work.

[00:09:38] I was pretty banged up, had to spend some time in the hospital after that.

[00:09:42] Ended up getting my GED and eventually got recruited to play

[00:09:46] College Athletics at Rutgers and if it worked for that,

[00:09:49] so those two things, me getting my GED and me getting that athletic

[00:09:53] recruitment to Rutgers, I don't think I'd be here today.

[00:09:55] So those experiences really shaped me and left me with the sense

[00:10:01] that I'm just playing on like bonus time here.

[00:10:04] This is like a bonus post mortem round that I've got and I've got to do the

[00:10:08] best I can to make this time, Kel.

[00:10:11] Alistair, I want to pull on a couple of things which you've said

[00:10:16] and also what Greg said and what you do now is you're a doctor.

[00:10:23] So you're in the caring professions and then you have structurally

[00:10:27] put together a couple of organizations that are to help people

[00:10:33] to be more politically astute, active around that.

[00:10:39] But how that links to your origin story.

[00:10:44] You also said that you went to go and help a friend.

[00:10:48] Now, you said that you come from a relatively deprived background.

[00:10:54] It's easier to be altruistic and to think about others if you have,

[00:11:00] as Greg alluded to, if you have stable income, some way to live, etc.

[00:11:06] Somewhat more difficult if you come from a deprived background.

[00:11:11] So why is it that if we link the two things together,

[00:11:14] there's a level of altruism, caring for others, concern for others

[00:11:18] and protection for others?

[00:11:19] Where do you think that has come from for you?

[00:11:23] Yeah, I think it's a really good question where I feel I think the first thing

[00:11:26] I would say is that while my background in the community that I was raised

[00:11:32] in economically might have been deprived, my heritage was not.

[00:11:37] I was raised by an incredible fighter.

[00:11:41] My mom speaks four languages,

[00:11:44] went through a harrowing experience with metastatic cancer

[00:11:49] when I was a young kid on her own, worked two jobs through it

[00:11:53] and taught me the importance of education.

[00:11:55] And I think that with that foundation,

[00:11:59] I really had the stable footing to really find myself.

[00:12:03] But I'll say this as sort of a follow-up where I feel

[00:12:07] that I wasn't even the smartest kid in my neighborhood.

[00:12:12] You know what I'm saying? I'll change the names,

[00:12:15] but Chris used to beat me at Backgammon in Mrs. Coladine's eighth grade math class

[00:12:20] every week and George could do long division by the side quicker than anybody in the class.

[00:12:26] Both of those guys got caught up in things that they shouldn't have gotten caught up in,

[00:12:31] but quite frankly, they did so because they didn't have any other options.

[00:12:35] The margin for error was so slim in our community.

[00:12:38] And I think about those guys a lot because were it not for the ZIP code

[00:12:44] that they were raised in, what could they have been?

[00:12:49] What kind of impact might they have had on the world?

[00:12:53] And I was lucky enough to make it.

[00:12:55] And so I understand the opportunity that I've been given

[00:13:01] and the opportunity that many of my folks in my community were not given.

[00:13:05] And then with that, I've got a responsibility to make the world just a little bit more fair.

[00:13:10] And if I can put my finger on the scale for folks who come from communities like mine, I will.

[00:13:17] Do you know the story of Ramana John?

[00:13:20] I don't know.

[00:13:21] The famous story, the movie Good Will Hunting was loosely based on it,

[00:13:26] but this destitute Indian man who grew up in just a small village in India

[00:13:34] was really good at math but was completely unschooled.

[00:13:40] But he got his hands on a mathematics textbook

[00:13:43] and he started extrapolating all sorts of incredible theorems.

[00:13:50] And nobody in India could make heads or tails of it.

[00:13:53] So one of his teachers, or somebody suggested they have great mathematicians in England.

[00:14:01] This was around the same time of Bertrand Russell and Wittgenstein had their revelation.

[00:14:08] And he sent it to three famous mathematicians, two of the letters nobody knows what happened to.

[00:14:15] One of the letters went to G.H. Hardy, who was the most famous mathematician at the time

[00:14:21] and considered the greatest mathematician in England.

[00:14:25] And Hardy looked at it and it was almost indecipherable sprawl.

[00:14:31] And because Ramana John was self-taught, he had developed his own notation.

[00:14:36] So it didn't make a whole lot of sense.

[00:14:39] And he said, well I'm this poor Indian and I'm self-taught,

[00:14:43] but here are some theories that I'm working on.

[00:14:45] And the only thing that Hardy could make out is he was trying to say

[00:14:50] a proof that Hardy thought he had solved.

[00:14:53] He actually did not.

[00:14:55] Anyway, so he threw it in the trash can and then he went along his day.

[00:15:00] He thought it was some sort of prank.

[00:15:02] But it kept gnawing at him.

[00:15:04] And after lunch he took it out of the trash can and he started looking through it.

[00:15:08] And then that night he went to his main collaborator, Littlefield's house.

[00:15:13] And by midnight they realized that they had just happened upon one of the greatest mathematicians who ever lived.

[00:15:21] They brought him over to Cambridge, it was.

[00:15:25] And they worked with for a couple of years.

[00:15:29] Unfortunately Ramana John would get tuberculosis in his 20s.

[00:15:33] But his notebooks are still studied.

[00:15:36] But exactly the thing you're talking about, how many Ramana Johns have we lost?

[00:15:41] How many places, how many Georges and that affects us.

[00:15:45] That's right. And Greg, what's interesting about the marginalized?

[00:15:50] They're not mainstream.

[00:15:52] They know how to survive on the margins.

[00:15:55] And those that live on the margins tend to be the most experientially innovative.

[00:16:01] They practice what I call survival based efficiency because it's life or death on the margins boy.

[00:16:08] And they can do the most with the least.

[00:16:12] Okay, so what happens when you break somebody who survives on the margins into the center?

[00:16:17] Damn they blossom. Right?

[00:16:19] Why? Because we've been out on the margins trying to tough it out.

[00:16:23] This mentality I think we've often looked at as a deficit.

[00:16:27] But I'm here to tell you that there are other narratives that are more empowering than that.

[00:16:32] Seeing that that have worked in Ukraine right now.

[00:16:35] Say more.

[00:16:37] Ladies, tell us.

[00:16:39] Yeah, just living in Ukraine and in all of Eastern Europe when as I did for 15 years,

[00:16:44] people needed to hack to survive.

[00:16:46] Yes.

[00:16:47] You want to watch a movie? You have to figure out how to hack something together.

[00:16:50] They didn't, when the iPhone launch it didn't have a carrier.

[00:16:54] So officially you couldn't use an iPhone in Ukraine.

[00:16:57] But you could buy one and get one hacked on Khrushadek and for 20 bucks within two weeks of the launch.

[00:17:03] And you can see that same hacking happening now.

[00:17:07] That's right. Love that.

[00:17:10] He is a question, Alistair.

[00:17:13] So you've described a group of people who economically, societally pushed to the margins.

[00:17:20] I come from one of those groups in the UK too.

[00:17:23] How easy is it to maintain that link with that community if at least the trappings of your life,

[00:17:33] your success and your outlook become mainstream because you've succeeded in a very conventional way?

[00:17:39] Yeah, that's a great question.

[00:17:41] That is such a good question where I feel.

[00:17:43] And I think about that too.

[00:17:45] I don't have kids, but I hope to one day and I think a lot about that question in relation to raising children.

[00:17:53] Does the struggle that I went through, right?

[00:17:57] I'm not growing up with my dad trying to figure out how to be a man in this society,

[00:18:04] a black man in this society on my own understanding how to process my own feelings of anger

[00:18:12] and all of these things, the setbacks that came along the way, nearly losing my mom,

[00:18:18] watching her get sicker and almost waste away in front of me, right?

[00:18:22] Which is part of the reason why I'm a physician today.

[00:18:25] Dropping out of high school trying to figure out how the hell do I get back on track.

[00:18:29] These things all were incredibly nightmarish to go through,

[00:18:33] but boy it really revealed myself to myself and gave me these empowering stories

[00:18:39] that I still tell myself to this day about my ability to overcome

[00:18:43] and to actually leverage adversity as a resource.

[00:18:47] But do I need to have my kids go through that?

[00:18:50] Is that the threshold that I should be looking for my son or daughter

[00:18:56] to have to pass in order to evolve into who they are and to self-actualize?

[00:19:02] So I think you're asking a very good question.

[00:19:04] To answer it bluntly in terms of the peace around connection to the communities,

[00:19:10] that's why I do the work I do.

[00:19:12] That's why I will always have a foot in the emergency department no matter what I do.

[00:19:16] I will always work in an emergency department.

[00:19:19] Why? Because it keeps me in touch with the people.

[00:19:22] Go to any emergency department in this country and what you will hear

[00:19:28] are the preoccupations of the people of that community.

[00:19:32] The things that folks are struggling with.

[00:19:35] The real people.

[00:19:36] And lastly I'll say this, when I was working in the White House,

[00:19:39] boy those walls are thick.

[00:19:41] What I mean by that is you can be so far removed from the people that you're actually helping

[00:19:47] that you sometimes lose sight of who is going to be the beneficiary,

[00:19:52] the recipient of this policy one day.

[00:19:54] The actions are so far removed from the outcomes in a place that high.

[00:19:59] And I think actually that by keeping yourself grounded in community,

[00:20:04] the interventions, the policies, the ways that we think about laws

[00:20:09] get so much more real and relevant and impactful.

[00:20:13] And I hope to never lose that.

[00:20:15] But obviously you're saying all the right things,

[00:20:19] all these great inspirational things and dare I say it,

[00:20:23] that's the reason why you're known to Greg and you're on the podcast.

[00:20:28] It must become fatiguing, tiring to consistently see the same problems

[00:20:35] in the emergency room and to fundamentally know what the solutions are.

[00:20:41] Not that these solutions are easy but to know that there are let's say five,

[00:20:45] six, a dozen solutions and not to see those action policy wise.

[00:20:52] How do you keep going?

[00:20:55] Day after day, week after week.

[00:20:58] I think the first principle of the change maker mindset for me

[00:21:04] is that you have to believe that change is possible.

[00:21:08] If you don't start there then nothing else matters.

[00:21:12] And I thought that they believed that change is possible.

[00:21:16] It's just for me a matter of time right until the interventions,

[00:21:21] the programs, the campaigns take hold and create the vision of the future

[00:21:25] I see in my head.

[00:21:27] It's just a matter of time.

[00:21:29] And actually I don't see the repetitive displays of the problem

[00:21:33] in the emergency room department.

[00:21:35] I don't see that necessarily as frustration anymore.

[00:21:38] I see that as data, as an opportunity to better understand

[00:21:42] the nuances of the problem.

[00:21:44] And I believe that the better I understand the problem I'm trying to solve,

[00:21:49] the better the solution is on the other end.

[00:21:52] Just give us a few minutes.

[00:21:54] We got to pay the power bill.

[00:21:56] We're going to have a short break and we'll be back in just a few minutes.

[00:22:03] I've always thought cynicism is the idiot's version of intelligence, right?

[00:22:09] It's always easier to sound intelligent when you're being cynical

[00:22:14] and talking about what things can happen.

[00:22:16] Right.

[00:22:17] But to achieve anything you have to believe that they can.

[00:22:20] And I remember the Orange Revolution in Ukraine.

[00:22:25] Ukraine used to be a very cynical place.

[00:22:28] It's very different than today, obviously, where Ukraine gives the world open a lot of ways.

[00:22:35] But 20 years ago, boy, it was different.

[00:22:39] And I, before we started, I shared that I recently got to meet Victor Yushchenko.

[00:22:46] And we spent over two hours over dinner with just maybe a dozen other people.

[00:22:52] Not once did he say, I did this or I did that.

[00:22:55] He kept talking about his belief in the Ukrainian people.

[00:22:59] It's really quite amazing.

[00:23:01] He had such faith.

[00:23:03] He was a guy who was not a good speaker.

[00:23:05] Intelligent for sure.

[00:23:07] But not a charismatic leader, not a good speaker, not a really good politician, to be honest.

[00:23:17] But he had such belief in Ukrainian people and such hope that he was able to change the world.

[00:23:25] And it would be a very different place.

[00:23:27] And I shared with you how when his face was disfigured, he marched down to parliament

[00:23:32] and he said, look at my face.

[00:23:34] Look at my face so it doesn't happen to you because this doesn't have to be about me.

[00:23:41] This can be something what they did to me can actually move the world forward in a positive place.

[00:23:49] And I just want to one of the things I never asked you because we both know somebody else that's like that.

[00:23:54] Sirjav Popovic, who practically invented the the color revolutions

[00:24:00] and believed that Serbia can change when almost nobody else thought it could.

[00:24:05] How did you and I know you you work with him and he helps you organize,

[00:24:11] but how did you meet Sirjav?

[00:24:13] Because I know he's such a big admirer of yours as well.

[00:24:16] Yeah, man, that's an incredible individual.

[00:24:19] So we'll have to start the story back in 2013.

[00:24:24] I was a frustrated medical student at Harvard in my third year and frustrated is is the PG version of the word that I would use.

[00:24:34] If this if this weren't a family friendly podcast, I'd use a different one.

[00:24:38] But I was frustrated because the vision I had of what being a doctor was like was not what I was seeing on the wards in the hospital as a third year medical student.

[00:24:52] That's the first time I'd ever been on the side of clinicians.

[00:24:56] And and I had this rude awakening to how broken our health care system was.

[00:25:01] I was I was touching almost patients be discharged to the cold when it's four degrees outside in Boston.

[00:25:08] I was seeing how patients who did not have insurance were charged 10 times more for an aspirin than those that did have insurance.

[00:25:16] Right. I was seeing how basically our system rewarded doing extra stuff to people that maybe didn't even actually make them healthier because it made an economic profit.

[00:25:29] Right. And so I was crestfallen with the fact that health care wasn't what I thought it was going to be.

[00:25:34] And I had a decision to make do I, you know, keep going down this path and be complicit in this broken system?

[00:25:39] Or do I try and figure out how do I address some parts of this and make it better than I found it?

[00:25:45] And so that's when I decided to leave medicine.

[00:25:48] And I went to the Harvard Kennedy School of Government for two years and then worked in politics up in Vermont for a year working for the governor.

[00:25:56] And that experience for me really opened up this new doorway to understand where the levers of change are and how to pull them.

[00:26:05] And one of the people that I met that really changed my life is a man by the name of Marshall Ganz.

[00:26:10] He's a very famous community organizer, worked with the Obama campaign.

[00:26:15] Work with Cesar Chavez.

[00:26:17] Cesar Chavez as well, exactly.

[00:26:19] And Marshall and I formed a relationship during my time at the Kennedy School and then afterwards.

[00:26:25] And as we were doing the initial organizing efforts for Vote ER, which is our program that's all about helping patients register to vote in health care settings,

[00:26:34] we've helped nearly 100,000 people make their voices heard in elections all across the country.

[00:26:40] At the beginning of that work, I recognized that we had mobilized thousands of physicians and nurses and social workers to do this very simple act of helping their patients register to vote.

[00:26:52] I realized we were hitting a wall.

[00:26:54] It didn't seem like this really good idea was catching fire and holding like I thought it should have.

[00:27:02] And I met with Marshall and I said, we're hitting a wall.

[00:27:05] We've only got like three or four thousand docs and nurse social workers on board.

[00:27:10] What do you suggest?

[00:27:11] And he said to me, sir, it sounds like you're doing a lot of top down selling.

[00:27:18] It sounds like you're trying to advertise this work.

[00:27:22] If you're really trying to cultivate this movement, you've got to have doctors talking to doctors.

[00:27:27] You've got to have nurses talking to nurses.

[00:27:29] You've got to start organizing at the individual level.

[00:27:32] And so he connected me with Paja Soikovich, who's a community organizer and a student of Marshall Ganses.

[00:27:40] And then Paja and Serja worked together many different projects all at the intersection of health and community organizing.

[00:27:48] And so that's how we all got together back in 2020.

[00:27:51] Let me ask you this before we close because there's a problem I've been thinking about.

[00:27:56] And you know from my book that I have certain opinions on different movements, which we don't need to go into right now.

[00:28:03] When I look at change, there's a bunch of different threads, right?

[00:28:08] One comes from Harvard Business School through John Cotter, which I don't think very much of in the eight steps,

[00:28:15] which really seems a lot like a bunch of executives were telling self-serving stories and a Harvard professor believed them,

[00:28:23] which is how a lot of business thought gets shaped.

[00:28:27] There's Everett Rogers, who's I'm sure you're familiar with the he's famous for the diffusion curve.

[00:28:33] But what he should be famous for is he pioneered this field with hundreds of researchers over decades that have really learned a lot about change.

[00:28:43] There is Duncan Watson networks, which didn't start about to change, but this is really important.

[00:28:49] And then there's this last thread that starts off with Jean Sharp and then goes through Marshall Gans and and Sir Jha and the Center for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies,

[00:29:03] where they've had a lot of success.

[00:29:06] These are the people that started the color revolutions changed the world all the great work Marshall Gans has done through Caesar Chavez and so many other projects he's been involved with.

[00:29:18] But when you look at most people who call themselves activists who think that they are working for change,

[00:29:28] they don't seem to know about that thread very much or any of the others.

[00:29:35] Um, Saul Alinsky, my gosh, how often do we overlook him and his rules for radicals?

[00:29:42] Yeah, why do you think the activism in this country is so bad?

[00:29:46] We go from failed movement to failed movement and people say the opposite of what you're saying.

[00:29:53] They say the system can never change and the Dext Act against me rather than say what you just said, you have to understand the levers and how to pull them.

[00:30:04] Because if you're engaging in bad activism, you're setting the cause back.

[00:30:10] And you're, if you're not serious about winning, you're just doing a bunch of stuff that makes you feel good.

[00:30:17] And I think I see a lot of people who say they're engaged in change work are actually just trying to make themselves feel good.

[00:30:25] And I would add to that that a lot of people who are engaged in change work are just trying to build a platform for themselves.

[00:30:33] Where the sort of selfish egoic intentions are overriding what is necessary for the movement or what is necessary to solve the problem in front of them.

[00:30:44] I think the other piece that I would offer up is that a lot of my experience in education in exercising leadership,

[00:30:52] and I say that intentionally exercising leadership, not being a leader because I think everyone can exercise leadership,

[00:30:59] comes from the world of adaptive leadership in Ronald Heifetz framework.

[00:31:05] And for folks who don't know where Ronald Heifetz is, he's a physician who was a psychiatrist to many Fortune 500 CEOs for a decade or so.

[00:31:15] And he eventually decided to leave his practice because he found that the same patterns of problems kept coming up through his patients,

[00:31:24] the clients that he was taking care of, these sort of captains of industry that were deeply personal problems that were leaking out and beginning to influence the organizational strategy and culture in ways that were dead from out.

[00:31:39] One of the things that he believes that I think is relevant to this question here, Greg, about why advocacy efforts so often fall flat in this country is that if you are doing the work of trying to raise the temperature in a system

[00:31:54] and really point out the ways in which the status quo is failing people, that work we might call exercising leadership.

[00:32:03] Right? You're drawing energy and attention to a problem.

[00:32:07] Well, guess what happens over time?

[00:32:09] The folks who are vested in the status quo, they want to take you off the map.

[00:32:15] They don't like the way you rock in the boat and the way that you're raising the heat.

[00:32:20] And so what they will often do is look for ways to make you the issue.

[00:32:25] And back in the day in the 60s, what happened?

[00:32:28] They'd kill you.

[00:32:30] How many of our big historic figures were just literally assassinated?

[00:32:35] Nowadays, you can't assassinate somebody unless you're a Boeing whistleblower.

[00:32:40] But what you can do is you can seduce them.

[00:32:44] You give them a nice plum job with a nice chief, something officer role and you pay them a lot of money and you just basically take them off the map.

[00:32:55] And I think a lot of leaders would be leaders, people who are pushing on the status quo oftentimes get co-opted by the system and take these positions that financially solve some of their problems but don't actually get them further in terms of the movement they were trying to lead in the first place.

[00:33:12] I think there's a lot of that co-opting or seducing that takes really good leaders and converts them into agents of the status quo.

[00:33:20] Or as I like to put it, there's a lot of people who'd rather make a point than make a difference.

[00:33:25] I like it.

[00:33:27] I was just going to ask one last question.

[00:33:30] Yes.

[00:33:31] Yeah, because I'm the outsider here, I'm the Brit and listening to your story, I think there's one American tradition would sign up and say this could only ever happen in America.

[00:33:42] A traditional more right-leaning would say this is proof positive.

[00:33:46] Anyone can strive in America, it doesn't matter what your background is and Alistair Martin is proof positive of that.

[00:33:53] Then there's another tradition which would say you've excelled despite a whole load of institutional, societal and economic barriers.

[00:34:06] Actually, it wasn't nepotism but actually it was a hard-working mother of color that helped you to succeed which tradition rightfully owns Alistair Martin.

[00:34:17] I think you understand where I feel that it's much more complicated than that.

[00:34:21] Nah, so everything's binary, black and white, left and right, red and blue.

[00:34:26] What I will say is that I am equal parts the investments that really smart people have made in me.

[00:34:34] Like my mom, I had a key mentor growing up an African American lawyer who was like a father figure to me in my teenage years.

[00:34:43] Actually, the reason why I play tennis to this day is in large part a way to honor him and his impact on me.

[00:34:52] And also luck man, honestly, there are some things that happened to me in my community that were a couple minutes earlier or later and I wouldn't be here.

[00:35:04] And so I do the work that I do with great humility because I know that were it not for a couple of things, I might not be here.

[00:35:13] I think that what I can control is how I use this opportunity that I've been given.

[00:35:20] And yeah, my hope is that by the end of my life, I will have contributed to making our country just a little bit less unfair and help folks in communities like mine have opportunities like I've been able to have.

[00:35:35] Thanks so much for coming on.

[00:35:38] I'm always so inspired by not only your work, but your story.

[00:35:43] Appreciate you, Greg. Thank you very much and it's an honor meeting you, Roy Phil.

[00:35:47] Listen, likewise, and I say this literally at the end of all these interviews, but everybody makes you feel like the lazy bum I really am.

[00:35:55] So it's been inspiring to hear your story and great to hear it in person, sir.

[00:36:03] Awesome.

[00:36:08] So what did I tell you, Roy Phil? Pretty impressive. Yeah.

[00:36:13] Yes, what an accomplished man probably only a little over half my age and has done five times more in his life than I ever likely to achieve.

[00:36:23] That's one of the benefits of doing this podcast, Roy Phil. I introduce you to a better class of people.

[00:36:30] Yes, I will give you that. The one thing which I really did take away was where do you attribute success culturally?

[00:36:41] Yes, he had his mother and he sounds like a really formidable woman to bring him up as a single parent.

[00:36:50] But culturally, who takes credit for Alistair?

[00:36:55] I think that's a really fascinating question for me anyway, listening to him and he's used his relative disadvantage as a spur.

[00:37:07] But I think, as I said in the conversation, many right-leaning Americans would say only in America.

[00:37:14] Could that be such a thing?

[00:37:16] Whereas many left-leaning Americans would say in spite of these inherent problems, roadblocks, hurdles, whatever, he's got through.

[00:37:27] And the very lack that there are more Alistair's which tells you that the system is skewed against people that come from his background.

[00:37:35] And the very fact that he couldn't really answer that was incredibly fascinating.

[00:37:39] Yeah, so what I took away and what I loved about what Alistair said, because he's done so many big things.

[00:37:46] But when he talks about it, you can see that he actually shrunk them down, right?

[00:37:52] Because you can't solve the entire world yourself.

[00:37:56] And this is such an important element of the changemaker mindset.

[00:38:00] You can solve something. And something is always better than nothing.

[00:38:06] When we work with organizations, one of the things that we do is we always start with a keystone change.

[00:38:14] And when we're designing the keystone change and figuring out where to start, one of the things we keep asking is how can we make it smaller?

[00:38:22] How can we make it smaller?

[00:38:24] So until we shrunk the entire initiative down to one process, one product, one team, one location,

[00:38:32] change always has to start somewhere.

[00:38:35] You need to be able to show that you can make it work.

[00:38:38] And that's actually how big things get done, they start small.

[00:38:50] Thank you for tuning into episode two of the Changemaker Mindset with Greg Sattel and Royfield Brown.

[00:38:55] We hope you enjoyed our dive into the world of innovation and changemaking.

[00:38:59] We need your continued support, so please don't forget to subscribe on whatever podcatcher you use and leave a review and share this podcast with your friends and colleagues.

[00:39:10] To stay updated, follow Greg and Royfield on LinkedIn and join our mailing list for exclusive content and updates on changemakermindset.net.

[00:39:20] We also welcome your feedback and suggestions for future episodes.

[00:39:24] Be sure to look out for episode three in two weeks where we'll be talking to the inspiring Rob Wilcott.

[00:39:30] Digital allows us to compress all sorts of capabilities in smaller and smaller packages and distribute them all over the economy ever closer to each moment in time and space.

[00:39:40] And because of this, digital pushes the production and provision of value product services experiences ever closer to the moment of actual demand in time and space.

[00:39:52] Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time on Changemaker Mindset.