#305 - Evan Baehr - Managing Partner @ Learn Capital - On A Mission to Advance Human Flourishing

Chris Powers: Evan, welcome to the show.

I'm excited about today.

Evan Baehr: Chris. Hey, fun to be with you. Sorry, we're not in person up in the fort, but I will settle to be with you electronically; I look forward to the conversation. 

Chris Powers: Yeah. And we get to hang out in a few months, which I'm excited about. I've been researching you the last two days even more, and if I could synthesize all of my research into one thing, I haven't had a guest on or met anybody who cares about human flourishing. The way you do, and we'll talk in the episode, the many ways your life has been dedicated to this idea, but I would start with what that means to you.

And then I want to go backward and go to what happened in life that this became the thing for you. 

Evan Baehr: I have had a bit of vocational Tourette's. I don't mean that as a psychological slight. I know it's a real deal for a lot of people. I mean it casually. I've had many fits and starts; some think it's all orchestrated to be a grand plan.

I see more of it as turning into cul de sacs, realizing it's a cul de sac, let's turn around. But that's given me a lot of chances to think about how different vocations and disciplines can drive towards an expected end. And so that's been through law and public policy through ministry, philanthropy, venture capital, entrepreneurship, hospitality, real estate, and you ask, what is all that for?

You can run after each of those disciplines in ways to refine your craft, and it might be fulfilling or meaningful: make money, make your investors money. But I was trying to understand what my North Star will motivate why I work hard and run fast after many things.

And as a Christian, I can begin with a particular understanding of how. I was made how the world was made and how humans were made, and a mentor, a friend, and an early executive at the Apple store shared this, which has just stuck with me for a long time. So I won't share his name, but he's essentially the guy who pitched Steve Jobs on having a retail store around 2000. He tells Steve they should have this test shop on University Ave in Palo Alto. He came up with a pretty unorthodox design for what the store would look like, which is similar to what it looks like today. This guy is a strong Christian, and he said he was just given this vision of what the garden would look like.

And how people might encounter each other, encounter salespeople, encounter products in a way that would feel like you're in the garden. And I asked, Did you tell Steve this when making this pitch? And he said, "Oh, no, I would never tell Steve that. And so I love that he said, Christians, if you are Christian, you believe in the Bible, he said, you have the owner's manual to the human.

And it's this cheat code that if you don't have it, you don't have it, but it's precious to understand. If you understand how we were made, then you at least have some direction around the intent of how to make this person be what they are supposed to be. When you read the owner's vehicle manual, you learn how to use the clutch, shift the gears, and put on the parking brake.

And similarly, his case was that the Bible has some playbook-like feature for understanding humanity. And so that stuck with me, both the beauty of that as a Christian and, more importantly, the importance of developing a compatible but different language to articulate things that resonate with people who don't share.

My theological convictions, which you as a Christian, some of the things we believe are pretty crazy, and many people don't believe these things. We need to find a way to have a common grace and common goals to discuss these shared ends with people.

And people also reach some of these same ends through economics, philosophy, or different religions. So that's for me, where this concept of human flourishing emerges. It's compatible with my understanding of how and why we were made but allows us to engage in it.

Conversational disciplines that are much more accessible to a broader range of people. So, in the early stages, I'd love to build a human flourishing movement. Let me talk more about that. There's a little flavor on how I got interested in it. 

Chris Powers: Was there a moment or something when your parents got into this?

Your faith has dictated a playbook that you intend to follow. But was there something you can draw back on that was a moment where you're like, this is where I'm going to spend a lot of my life? I asked that because of what you say; if you asked everybody, " Hey, do you think humans should flourish?

Maybe not; everybody would say yes, but most people would say yes. And then you should dedicate most of your life to it. And they'd say, I'm going to work in software or something. You did not do that. Was there somebody or something that pushed you?

Evan Baehr: The refrain in my birthday cards as a child. Written by my parents, where did he come from? Question mark. And so my parents are amazing people. I've learned a lot from them. And I also was just a strange kid. Everyone did one thing. I did the other thing. And all of this was top-down.

Then I read this remarkable treatise, came to a new understanding, and went forward confidently. That happened. While at Princeton, I got to be with some outstanding faculty, including Professor Robbie George, theologians, philosophers, and economists.

Some of my convictions about theology, economics, history, and politics, mainly like when we look across history, what systems have worked, there was a long time in history where, whether you're looking at measures of flourishing or G.D.P., it's flat for like many thousands of years.

And then it J curves and rockets straight up from that. That is the beginning of the industrial revolution, the full realization of capitalism in Western market systems. And that is one of the most significant times of unleashing human progress we've ever seen. We might be at a new one right now in A.I.

So that was some top-down learnings, but then a lot of experiential stuff came from trying to do things that I thought would be very satisfying, leading to my flourishing, only to be surprised that they didn't. And I had this long first decade of my adult life, essentially.

Competing in admissions, I just got obsessed with going to many schools and went to a lot. And it's just like a boring game to play. Honestly, it's you who's the winner anyway. So, I had several things for a while:

If I get into this graduate school.

If I get this job.

If I get this fellowship and then play that forward,

Start the first company if we raise 1,000,000 if we raise 10,000,000 and each of those refrains was when that happens if I can get there, I will feel great joy and happiness and be in this new era. I've also done that with how much money I had as a kid. Oh, my gosh, if there's ever a year in my whole life where I made 100,000, I would be set.

It's just a refrain, and then the second chapter of each event was essentially the same story: happiness never appeared or lasted nine minutes. And a funny one was we were racing. I was the second company I was building. And we were raising venture capital for it.

And again, it was that if we just raised 10 million, was this round we were putting together? And so we get the round done. It runs in TechCrunch, and that afternoon, like four hours later, this sort of friend, competitive frenemy of mine in the same industry TechCrunch article runs that his company raised 100 million. 

And I was like, no, give me at least a day of feeling like I have accomplished something, and I didn't even get that. So, some of these flourishing areas are expected, but some are unexpected. I'm now backing into learning about some of those through the literature. Still, I experienced much of that in my life, where I would run after trying to achieve academic, professional, or financial success. Then, they underperformed in terms of moving my happiness needle.

So what do you run after that does give you contentedness? There's a lot around the quality of your relationships, and that is investing deeply into your marriage, your children, and close friendships. I've been fortunate to be in a few different groups of like-hearted men running after some of the same things, and that is not only a great source of practical wisdom for my life, but man, this is a fantastic source of feeling known and connected. 

And so I think many people financially put big wins up on the board in their influence, et cetera. But man, run around at home pretty in marriages that are wrecked with unhealthy relationships with their Children, not tied into any profound faith, community, or transcendent set of experiences, disconnected from their neighbors, potentially physically unhealthy, possibly addicted to substances, heavily medicated. The high-level story across the country, especially the entrepreneurial class, is that we are fatter, sicker, more depressed, and more medicated despite massive advances in technology and medicine.

And so it's a real difficulty around, I think what it says is we've been running after things that we thought would be satisfying and ignoring the ones that now the research and our experience is starting to say, Hey, this is the kind of thing that when you're practicing forgiveness, when you're practicing connectedness, when you're finding a way to serve someone that has less than you, not only does the Western tradition or the Bible or philosophy say, which those things do say but we're starting to see this really in the empirical literature, which is exciting because it's not just about persuading Christians that they should do Christian things.

It's about exploring an area of science. It is really about what is the human lived experience about. Yes, it also is for our lives or how we lead our lives. Business owners are civic leaders, policymakers, and elected officials. Now, what are we trying to optimize for? I'll end with this little example.

This global movement exists; these global overlords are at the United Nations and other multinational organizations.

Chris Powers: Like W. E. F. 

Evan Baehr: World Economic Forum, that entire world of the Davos jet setter, Harvard faculty space. They spent a lot of time developing various ways of measuring the success of a society.

So, they developed the sustainable development goals as a product of the United Nations. And it does have some things in it that are good. It's measures around access to education, women's rights, clean water, et cetera. But the great irony is that at the moment when the United States is a highly high performer on the S.D.G.s, it's the same year for a pretty large subset of the American population.

The lived reality for the white male in America is so unpleasant that we've started killing ourselves at such a rate through suicide that our aggregate life expectancy has decreased. So, the fact that we are at peak S.D.G. performance and choosing. To just exit the stage left through suicide or deaths of despair, I think, calls into real question this alternative regime that these people have created that there's got to be something else out there that we're missing.

Chris Powers: Can you go a little deeper on that? What came out at the time? And what is S.D.G., by the way?

Evan Baehr: The S.D.G.s are these sustainable development goals, which is this set of goals promulgated and sponsored through the United Nations that many nations will sign up for saying, here's how we measure on these goals.

And then a lot of global philanthropy is organized around, Hey, are you helping move the needle on some of these S.D.G.s? So that's S.D.G. is a sustainable development goal. 

Chris Powers: Okay. And so, why do we start exiting left at an all-time high at a time when we're at an all-time high? And Cause we agreed to it at the World Economic Forum, whoever's coming up with these rules.

But why would we agree to that if we were doing so well? 

Evan Baehr: The S.D.G.s operate as a north star among many economic development people. And it's the people that have their religion. The good news is that we might understand human progress in some alternative and competing ways. This discussion matters because significant amounts of capital, primarily financial capital, are large pension funds.

Or indeed, family offices will allocate ways to move S.D.G.s precisely. We would move a lot of money if we swapped out the S.D.G. goals with different goals. It also has to do a lot with how people spend their time. You have many elite, and I want to change the world, college kids that want to go out and work at non-profits, et cetera, soak up the conversation on S.D.G. saying, Oh, my gosh, this is what I want to organize my life around.

So, there's an alternative framework. Several alternative frameworks are coming out right now, and one of them is called the Global Human Flourishing Project, run out of Harvard. And this fantastic set of academics is setting out on the most extensive sociological study ever conducted. So it's a 50 million project following a quarter million people in 32 countries for five years, and they probably put five more years on that.

So, they have investigated dozens of hypotheses about what might drive your flourishing for ten years. I find it absorbing. One of them they're investigating is forgiveness. They are asking for this survey. So they're hiking up a mountain in Malaysia to find this woman.

They'll find her five years in a row and interview her for 30 minutes. And all this gets compiled and analyzed and put in the state of projects. And so they will ask her the last time she forgave someone. When was the last time someone forgave you and asked about the qualitative nature of it? that experience

Another one is around practices of gratitude. There are a lot around friendship and connectedness. Still, when we look at this massive exiting of stage left in the last number of years, COVID was massive kerosene on that fire that accelerated a lot of that, but the deaths of despair started before that.

Any of the language and the resonance of Donald Trump found a connection with many people in this country who feel disconnected. They feel like they don't have a purpose. They feel like they're not needed. They have, through their own choice, but with lots of marketing dollars, come to consume 35 plus hours of television a week for men.

It's dozens of hours of online gaming a week, unique, crazy high consumption of alcohol and other substances, and consumption of pornography. Look across those things, and it sets up a dismal life experience for someone. There's this crazy and sad study about the deaths of despair and powerfully.

Sadly, we have a lot of data about people's last moments right before they take their lives because it's often recorded or filmed, and they send it or leave it behind sad. And so a sociologist analyzed, they said, what happens in those last moments, and the most common thing said in those last moments was no one needed me.

And it's a compelling concept that struck a chord with me across a few different areas of things we're trying to build and work on. Marvin Alasky is this elegant guy who went on to help shape a lot of the White House domestic policy in the early 2000s. He told me that in the sort of halfway houses in Texas 100 years ago, if you were indigent and homeless on the streets, there were these homes like a modern-day shelters that would have food, temporary housing, and the rule.

If a man came to ask to stay there for several hours before he got accepted into the house, she would chop wood. There's a big pile of wood outside, and he would chop wood. And if a woman came, it was something like they would ask her for a set of linens so she would work for several hours to gain acceptance into the space.

Marvin's explanation of this was different from that their labor was needed. There was enough wood chopped, enough dresses sewn, et cetera. It was to show the person that they were able to create something of value and to create the sense that they had a role to play in the success of that place, of that community.

And it's that little concept of Does someone need me? I've read a lot about many recovery groups and 12-step programs; every person has a role. Someone's pouring the coffee, cleaning out the coffee, putting out the trash, getting the trash, setting up row one of chairs, and setting up 202 chairs.

Everyone has a job. So there is something fundamental about if one view says We are your overlords. I will make sure you have political representation, clean water, access to education, free from violence, all these things. And we'll have you sit there and enjoy that set of freedoms. If no one needs you, who cares if you have clean water?

So that's the disconnect from the overlords who see it as this Machiavellian; I'm going to orchestrate for you this whole environment. That makes it look like you will flourish where someone who lives in a place with crime and doesn't have much opportunity and illness may be abounding.

Those are a lot of objective measures that make it look like they're not doing well, but man, they could be connected. They could be needed. They could be known. So it's a complex topic, but if we shape some of these big threads on what we think drives human flourishing, gosh, we could move a lot of money and a lot of energy and passion in the world in a way that puts the right kind of wins on the target.

Chris Powers: The great irony you just said is that these overlords or government agencies have tried to create that utopia. You can make an argument in a lot of ways. The more destructive things have become. In recent times, a question here and there's a quote that resonated with what you just said.

What if you assume everyone you met was in a battle you couldn't see? Most men in America say they don't have a single person they can confide in. So you have this growing swell of calling it disconnected and maybe issues, but at the same time, this distancing from everybody, the Internet was supposed to bring us all together in many ways.

It's brought us apart. And so I'm throwing a lot into this question. What's the role of government in human flourishing, or is it, or should it be left to the private sector?

Evan Baehr: In Democracy in America, Tocqueville's significant observations on his travels in America, he was obviously from the continent and a new continental Europe well, but what struck him about the uniqueness of this foreign country, America, he was visiting was that Americans did a fantastic number of things with each other.

Burke's colleague, Heather Warren, said that when the French want to get something done, they demand that the government do it. When the British want something done, they demand that the aristocracy do it. And when the Americans want something done, they do it. Tocqueville saw this in his era; it was the equivalent of the Lions Club, the Rotary, the Elks, and the Bridge Club. Civic associationism is the phrase that describes just the most amazing. You go to any small town, and that there The American flag is put up every day, and there are window boxes, a July 4th parade, and a bake sale.

No city agency's doing that. It is something uniquely American back to, the Puritans showing up landing in a rough Jamestown. There needed to be a federal agency to lay out a spread of food or create opportunities for volunteerism in Jamestown. So it's just in America's blood.

To do this stuff together in a beautiful, powerful way. Two events in the 20th century set us back there. So we've got this fantastic social safety net, social infrastructure in the United States created through civic life. So it's not business.

For the most part, it's not the government of any level. It's what we call non-profit organizations, but we need to remember the tax structure of it. It's mostly Americans being awesome together because they deeply care about each other. One of these man stories that I love, one of my favorite places to visit is Ellis Island, where in one year, they had a year where 10 million European refugees came through as immigrants, just off the tip of Manhattan in New York. 

What is so unique about that is that as they would get processed at Ellis Island, these civic organizations were organized by country. So, the Norwegians had this group.

In Manhattan, they knew when other Norwegians would be on a boat and when they were getting processed through Ellis Island. This park ranger at Ellis Island was telling me this story; he said that essentially, tens of thousands of people per day would be greeted by their national or ethnic receiving private organization where they would be given a place to stay, they would be given food to eat and essentially connected to a job. So we had a privately run, dozens of different languages, dozens of different foods, very complex system that resettled tens of millions of refugees.

With like really high performance, right? And by the way, it was free. To think of the complexity pulled off in the story of resettling this beautiful, incredible thing. And now you look at something like, Department of Homeland Security on the border, trying to.

Resettle or keep safe thousands of women, children, et cetera, coming across the border. We're spending billions of dollars building tents, prisons, and drones. And what a mess, right? We need to get the people who resettled the Ellis Island people down here and have them teach us something.

But these two things that happened in the 20th century were significant setbacks. And they were essentially the presidencies of F.D.R. and L.B.J. Wonderful thing. There are some great things that those two presidents did. But what happens in times of the Great Depression? Of seeing the significant needs of people hungry in the street.

Those were times when the system, the civil society system, was taxed. It strained the churches, synagogues, and social welfare, and private groups could not meet the demand of people in the food lines. And when that happened, the federal government stepped in and said, We must have this welfare program to care for American citizens.

We must create this social security program. We must create Medicare. We must create wealth Medicaid because people are dying in the streets. The challenge is that once those programs get spun up, they have proven impossible to shut down. So, in that short moment of failure, it meant that it was a hundred-year defeat for our civic associations. 

Chris Powers: On your website, you say, if you care about humans, build a company and one of the things, like one of the major ones, and it's really a network, but it's also a company that I want to talk about is Teneo and our good friend, John Marsh. I asked him before this, and I said, What should I talk to Evan about?

And he responded that Evan has three superpowers: gathering people, honoring relationships, and creating culture. All three of those things were expressed through Teneo. And so I want to go through what Teneo is and what brought you to get together some people that have now become an international organization.

Evan Baehr: Many college kids are excited to go, quote, and change the world. And something happened along the way such that when you want to make a difference in the world, the assumption is that you might engage in politics or policy. You could run for office or get into policymaking or advocacy. Let's go into media and journalism and expose and tell stories. 

You can work in non-profits because, of course, they have great missions and save the world. And for some reason, we hold business relatively low in our social status. Unfortunately, I came to believe through Peter Thiel, who I got to know when I was in graduate school. He told me this brief story about the starting of Palantir and now, tens of billions of dollars data technology company.

He and Alex Karp were sitting around, watching 9-11 happen. They saw the Towers crash. And they were like, what can we do for our country? We are nerds and probably can't enlist in the Marines. And yet we figured out how to beat the Russians, who are great at online theft, through building PayPal.

They became very good at understanding how money moves on the Internet. And they said we can use our unique skills to build a company that can dramatically advance the interest of the United States and its allies. And that was such a novel thing for me to think that you would build a company out of a passion to save the world.

I used to think you do non-profits or law, and there are other tools to pick up. And then, at least, my next flawed thinking was, Oh, business is valuable because business people make a lot of money and can use that money to do good things. So make a lot of money and give it to World Vision, politics, or whatever.

And then that saves the world. But what I came to understand is that businesses themselves. First, how do they care for and manage their people, which in some cases, like Walmart, employs what? 2 million people? It's running a city. For many companies, they have a much more significant impact on their suppliers and customers.

And so I came to believe that whatever big public problem you're discussing is fentanyl addiction, isolation, global warming, transportation, disconnectedness with neighbors, and urban design. All those problems have some complexity of why the government made them so bad. But man, call for entrepreneurs to say, I'm going to build a business to tackle that public problem mainly. 

And we can talk more about why businesses as tools are much more effective than the others. But I'm a big believer in that. And I also lament that most of the world doesn't share that opinion. Biden takes Elon off of some recognized climate change advisory group. That every environmentalist is not Claiming to give Elon the Nobel prize for building Tesla is utterly insane to me, and it builds poorly for the country.

So I came up for air. I was building a company, and I looked around and realized that a lot of my friends. While in college, we all had projects and things we were excited about, such as extracurriculars, magazines, edited newspapers, and ran political groups, faith groups, and advocacy groups; as college kids, you feel critical because you're the secretary of the North-eastern Libertarian Club or whatever bad thing, it is terrible, but it feels fantastic. It feels interesting because I care about this, and I'll be involved.

So I looked around and said, Alright, thanks; gosh, I'm sad for the state of the souls for the vocational fulfillment of many of my friends and myself who were a few years out of school. Many of us are marching down the path of being corporate legal drone management consultants and investment bankers.

And those were fine and great careers. But man, we lost the fire of being involved in things we knew were necessary for the world. The opening past was like, gosh, what if we could create some Organization, some network that identifies these people who love the same things, share values and some commitments philosophically, and are entrepreneurially minded of wanting to.

Work together to create and be a part of incredible projects advancing this concept of human flourishing. So it started as an email list, and then, fast forward, it's now tens of millions of dollars and thousands of people and hundreds of events and grew in entertaining and unexpected ways along the way to be one of the ventures, the projects that I'm most proud of that we got to build. 

Chris Powers: I want to spend more time here, mainly on community building. Okay, so you started as an email list. If it's like, what are the best practices for creating communities of any size?

That's a loaded question, but you've built several communities. You've built. Lots of them throughout your career. So you have a community building skill. So, if we title this part of the podcast: How to build a community, how do you build a community? 

Evan Baehr: We were inspired by seeing some compelling, effective communities.

They gave us a recipe book. We experimented with some of those recipes and ate our dog food. And we surveyed the heck out of people to create a constant feedback loop. And when you do that on any project for 15 years and iterate at least four to six times a year, you can become excellent at anything.

And so that's the spirit we set out in, and I'll share just a few of the principles that stood out to me first: participation over content. Many people trying to build communities have some goal: to liberate the Palestinians to advance China's interest or get people excited about gardening.

And the idea that they begin with is if we get these people together and give them all the correct information, they will be equipped with all the knowledge they need. That misses the mark. First, that information is entirely available on the Internet for free, and no one has chosen to consume it.

So, access to information is not the problem. Number two is when you introduce participation; when we design and produce events, we hope no one feels like an audience member, which is hard to do when you have 500 people coming to something. Our hope at a significant event is that when you're coming there and people ask, a co-worker says, Where are you going?

We hope that even the most junior person coming to one of our events would not say, I'm going to this conference or I signed up for this event. They would say, " Oh, I'm getting to lead a seminar on starting a podcast. Every person that comes has a role. If you're not a subject matter expert, your role is to run the morning Pilates, or you're going to be a table host and be intentional about the people coming to your table and know them by name. We try to give as many people and roles as possible. So our events look crazy. Over several days, we'd have hundreds of events, and an event might be.

Five people are having coffee, talking about working through managing an aging or ailing parent. Those five people in that conversation can be compelling. So, on the one hand, that sounds obvious. Still, in stark contrast, we built this other community earlier in my life and essentially sold it, handing off the leadership to this much larger organization.

And it was they took it over. They had older people who were donors. Usually, donors are older people, and their model of social change, their model of building community is, gosh, if we just had a ballroom filled with a thousand people and like an older person on the stage saying things at them. They would just be equipped and unleashed to wreck shop on society.

And when you're a thousand people in a room and feel like cattle, you're being herded into this thing. And that organization has tens of thousands of people. It's very well funded and exerts like zero cultural purchase. So, it was sad to see it go in that direction. So that is participation over content. 

Another is vulnerability over strength in many leadership organizations, young people, Y.P.O., older people, whatever. We want to tell stories about winning and hold out people with more zeros than others and more exits, etcetera. We realized that on a relative basis, most of the people we wanted to be in community with had a lot of other communities they were part of where they celebrate winning, and something is compelling about vulnerability.

Brene Brown has this line, which I love, and she says, why is it that when you see vulnerability? Practice by someone else. You perceive it as strength, but when you practice vulnerability, you experience it as weakness. So what does that mean? What's an example of that? If Chris, if you were to tell me the story about an ailing parent and the emotional lament that you had about disconnectedness with your father and How you wish you had done things differently. You're still grieving through that process. I would hear you say this story and think, wow, that is so awesome that he's sharing a bold, incredible story.

I want to get to know him more. I want to pursue that it's inviting. But someone asks me about a more vulnerable subject when I'm on the stage or in a small group. And I started to say those words; what I'm feeling in myself is weakness. I feel sad and low and incompetent and embarrassed and naked.

And so if you run that loop enough times. Seeing someone else communicate vulnerably and knowing there is great strength in that can be a superpower for your personal development and your ability to connect with others. One of the ways that our events feel very strange is that we have this set of things called morning stories, and it's a chance we ask people about different themes.

They might want to share five-minute morning stories, the tears and the pain, and the healing that has resulted from the opportunity for someone to share their story. On a stage that invites someone to share the story about their child, their loss, their father, their addiction, the invitation itself, and the ability to get to deliver is one of the most powerful ways of saying that person.

Your story matters. 

Chris Powers: So one thing I have, it's easy when I think about creating a community to get eight or ten people together, and that would be about your email list, but now the community is tens of thousands of people. And so the question is, do you think about communities that are tens of thousands of people the same way you thought about those first ten, or are there different things that come into play as the community gets larger?

Evan Baehr: Yeah, as the community grows, it creates real challenges to delivering a high level of hospitality. And an intimate level of connection. You might want to grow the community, however, because of the power that results from just the size of a network but also a wonky concept we call the strength of weak ties.

And. I give a talk on this every year, and both people in the audience love the talk. And so the basic concept is this. So Mark Granvetter, the sociologist, set out to answer the following question. He said, Let's say you take someone, and they have six close friends, and they are in the status right now of needing a job.

So this person, Jim, needs a job. Jim needs a job and has close friends, so a job is unavailable through his close network. Because if it were, he would already have it because he is tied into that network. The counterintuitive point is when you ask someone if you need a job, who are you most likely to get it through?

A close friend or a weak tie: The literature says it's always weak ties because close friends already provide you with resources. So what does that mean practically? Peter Thiel gave me this advice. If you are an M.B.A. finance person, cultivate weak ties with people dissimilar to you.

Many of us suffer from what we call network idioms. We spend time with people like us, age, race, gender, career, city, religion, et cetera, and what that practically means is that you don't access that many different kinds of capital. Yes, there's financial capital so that you can access different pools of capital, but cultural, spiritual, and political capital.

So, a more extensive and intentionally curated diverse network exposes you to a much larger set of weak ties. That means that we get emails that come out. One guy was stuck on the side of a mountain. In Nepal, and this bat phone request goes out, pings to the State Department, pings to this defense contractor, like an hour later, a helicopter shows up to pick this guy up off the side of a mountain.

The number craziest is that someone's dad just got diagnosed with some rare cancer. People see this; it turns out that their roommate is now a postdoc at Johns Hopkins, which is the leading place for that. And they like to get the person in. So, seeing how an extensive, diverse network committed to a common cause can drive change is just fun.

One of the ways you think about activating that network, though, is as we pull people into the network, ask two sides of the same equation. Number one, we say, Hey, tell us about a project. It could be your day job, but it might be like a side hustle you're excited about. 

Some people want to run for office. They want to write a book, start a podcast, build a club, join a board, be more involved in their kids, class, learn chess, whatever. Tell us what that is. Step two, we want to know what your superpowers are. What are the things that people come to you about, and how are you able to? How do you find yourself creating value for other people?

Then, we run a human-powered approach to understanding how to pair those things. So my hope is like in any group of 50 people, if we were in a room, so Y.P.O. does this, we try to do this exercise called the one thing. So you put 50 people in a room. And you have each person briefly share the one thing that, if you got it, learned it, whatever, would change everything.

And when you go around the room, everyone says they're one thing. After you say you're one thing, my dad is beginning stages of Alzheimer's. And the one thing would be a memory care center where we both feel connected. The practices, at least you wait, and then you wait until one person in the room says, Hey, I got you.

And it doesn't mean the person has the answer. They might, but I will be your running buddy on this thing. The high-level principle we drive is to be in a community. We want you to make your needs known. Let's find easy ways for you to tell us what you're working on and ways that we can be helpful.

And then number two, when you see those needs surfaced, get in, send that email, say like, how can I be a part of what you're up to? There are nerdy and practical ways this plays out. We do a lot of innovation around communications, so we host many lunches. Most lunches could be better. The food could be better.

You're at a 10-top table. Someone hogs conversation the whole time. The speaker needs to go on longer. Every corporate place has no windows. The good news for people who want to be better at convening and hospitality is that the bar is so low. It's so low. So we designed an event here.

I'll tell you briefly about this event. So, we think about the future of Austin. We get to live in Austin, Texas, and think about the future of this city. So we do a series of lunches with the most influential people in the town. And we sit on the lawn. So you're in beautiful sunlight in the shade.

We have a sumptuous buffet of fresh food, please. Why is every corporate lunch essentially a gluten festival? It's like miles of bread. Give me some vegetables, please, for the love of God—okay, so healthy food, healthy, fresh food. We do four-top tables, which is like The caterers find it annoying.

It takes a lot of work to source four top tables. But, when you think about the math, an eight-top table for 60 minutes versus a four-top table for 60 minutes. Smaller tables mean people get to speak twice as much at their table. So please end the eight top. Go to the four tops. My dream would be like 42 tops, but that's extreme.

And then there's the one top, but don't, let's not talk about the one top. That's a separate topic. Now you need at least the two tops. And so we do this thing. So everyone's gathering around. We have a welcome cocktail. It is always important to have non-alcoholic drinks to keep people hydrated, especially during the day.

You've got someone on a silver tray with lemonades, water, and iced tea. People get there. You want people to show up at something and always feel like. It was planned ahead of time for them to be there. Ash Marsh says that hospitality is thinking about someone before they arrive.

So where do they park? What signs do they see when they walk in the front door? How are they greeted? Are they getting a name tag to be deliberate about those things? They get there. They're given a beverage immediately. It's evident where they're supposed to be milling around. Then you got to have.

One or multiple hosts, Jim, this is Sally. You guys would love to get to know each other on this thing. So then we do; everyone is around in a big circle. We frame this one as a prompt. What is the ambition of Austin was the sort of topic. And we said in the invitation at a time, come with a one-liner.

Your answer was the ambition of Austin. You'll so give them, you want to avoid putting people on the spot. And so we go around; I'm Sandra. I am the C.E.O. of this tech company, and the ambition of Austin should be empowering the next generation of female entrepreneurs, whatever it is. So we went around, everyone went around, and then we did open seating this one.

We like place cards sometimes, but we tried open seating this one. We said, Hey guys, before you get your food. Once you find another person here that you were curious about their answer to that question. And so people are empowered to pick a seat somewhere. So they got a seat, sat at their four top, and then we had an excellent coffee and dessert spread; after that was a casual ending.

So it was only some people get up and leave simultaneously. So there were just elements that we looked to shoot: Martha Stewart, Wayne Gadara, Danny Meyer; there are some excellent books that are a little bit more on the not-network design side, but just on the hospitality side of things. And that's a real art that has been lost.

The art of the dinner party, and the misnomer many people have, is that I don't want to host people for dinner in my house because it's messy. We need fine china. I could be a better chef. But the beauty of dining in a home is the intimate connection you get from someone's home.

The conversation invariably takes a very different direction. It goes much longer. It's much more intimate. And so, in my future life, I would love to find a way to spur more people to host dinner parties and engage in hospitality. Sadly, we lost home ec.

Chris Powers: Is there ever one thing that you see people do?

They're like, I can't believe people keep doing this. What's the one thing to stay away from? Everybody still does it. And maybe it's just carb loading and not serving enough vegetables, but there's probably, if you see enough gatherings, you're always like, God, I can't believe people continue to do this, but they're doing it because it seems like a best practice.

Is there just a fatal flaw? That's more obvious to you than someone like me who still needs to throw a dinner party. 

Evan Baehr: A common assumption is that I, as the host, have much to offer and must share much content and information. It mainly happens in an organizational context.

So imagine you go to these fundraisers, political fundraisers, ministry fundraisers, launching a new project, whatever. And like the moment you sit down at the table as the presentation starts, and yes, you're convening these events, and you have some purpose at the event, but I think if you could turn the dial from 90% you, 10% them, switch it the other way.

Imagine you're hosting a fundraiser for an international justice mission. They might do a great job with this, but imagine they get up there, people file in the windowless ballroom, some hotel, and you sit down. They serve you tired surf and turf, white linens, bad florals, those conference chairs that have that like beaded thing. Anyway, it's all the same. They get up there. As soon as you sit down, food is served. Someone stands up, and it's this long procession of some donor who's loved being involved. Gary gets up and tells the story of liberating women. They have a woman get up and talk about her story of being liberated.

All that's beautiful90% them, 10% the guests. Imagine flipping that on its head. What if the prompt was, Hey, we're going to share a three-minute video to get everyone up to speed on the work of I.J.M. We're so honored that you are spending this time with us today and are already on your journey to defend justice.

So we'll watch this quickly. Backgrounder, but then we want to have your table host at your table, go around, and I want each person to share a story about how you've encountered injustice and the event planner probably is, but wait, we didn't communicate all the programs and successes that we have.

We only got 17 minutes explaining the mission of what we do coming out of that event. I bet I get the emotional thing about it. No one has ever actually asked me that question. That is the name of the organization where we're donors. I would have a decisive little moment and experience answering that question myself.

But man, to get to do that at a table with maybe some friends, maybe some new friends, I am sure that there'd be something said at that table from one of those people that like, Just as is beautiful and challenging and powerful. The big idea is to put your guests on the stage when you're convening.

Maybe literally, but certainly metaphorically, they are the people that you are celebrating and honoring and creating ways that they know that you thought about them ahead of time and are being engaged and honored in the experiences you produce. 

Chris Powers: That perfectly sums up what you said. I found this on the Internet, a controversial claim of yours.

That's not so controversial. Once I read it, I thought that if you want to change the world, build a group of friends with a common goal. And that's why I've been so interested in this topic; you've done it masterfully. I have one more question unrelated to anything we've discussed, but it is about the three personal things you've done.

You said I wrote and passed a bill to protect international mail-order brides. What on earth is that I have to know?

Evan Baehr: So I worked for a fantastic man, Frank Wolf, who was a congressman from Virginia who co-founded and co-chaired the congressional human rights caucus, which is this group of congressmen that other members were Nancy Pelosi, Chris Smith, and Tom Lantos.

Tom Lantos was the only survivor of a Holocaust internment camp to ever serve in the U.S. Congress, and they were pioneers on the cutting edge of Xinjiang Uyghur province and Darfur and internally displaced people doing the most fantastic work through Congress. And one of the issues we worked on was the mail-order bride industry.

Chris Powers: To be clear, what is the mail-order bride industry?

Evan Baehr: How it usually works is if you are, it's a male, it's an American man who wants a wife who pays an international agency, they may have a meetup of 50 or a hundred perspective, often Russian or Southeast Asian women. That had been flown into some house in New Jersey where you're walking around like you're adopting a pet, but you're picking a wife.

There are many cases where not all, but there are many cases where the woman is being sold a bill of goods. She knows nothing about the guy and is choosing to get married. And so we had a few cases that landed on our plate of the women getting killed or ending up as sex helots.

They don't speak the language. They show up with no connections. They're like showing a bedroom in a locked basement and becoming a sex helot. And that's the rest of their life. So we were like, this is bad. We should work on this. So we brought the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act, which I assumed would have no opposition.

It turns out there are a lot of businesses that make a lot of money trading women internationally. And so Yahoo, all these big internet platforms sent lobbyists to oppose our bill saying, gosh, Are you against love? Are you against marriage? It's no, we're against death. So we watered the bill and got it passed, which said, when you apply for this kind of visa, this international marriage visa, if the man had been convicted of a violent crime, we had to notify the woman.

So, at least she knew what she was getting into, but it was this sad. We were proud of the bill. I wish we could have done more, but it was this kind of sad window into the links to which big corporations and lobbyists will trample human rights to continue running their businesses.

Chris Powers: All right. I have to ask this one last question because I was watching an interview that you did, and I thought. I'm tying this to how corporations act, which makes little sense. What you just said. It would seem like a wrong decision by a corporation, but they do that.

They also think this is something else that's been weaponized. It's an acronym that goes by ESGand you had a perfect way of putting how you think of ESGas: Not cramming things a company should do. You said something about solar panels. Don't judge a company on whether it has solar panels on its roof.

Instead, invest in companies that are making solar panels. You called it going after the languishes of humanity, not the, I can't remember the other part of it. Can you expand on that? What do you think about E.S.G. investing? And we'll bring it home on this. 

Evan Baehr: E.S.G. for environmental, social, and governance.

Our is an acronym that describes various indices that have been built out as tools to be additional ways to measure the performance and health of a business alongside lots of traditional financial metrics. And there are many great things on the E.S.G. lists. In the area of environment, is it a well-digging operation, a mining operation in Congo that has massive pollution and violates children's human rights through slave labor?

A corrupt C.E.O. runs that, and there's no board. That's violating E.S. and G. So there are many great things in E.S.G., and a challenge in the E.S.G. movement is some of those have been elevated in Europe. There is a real passion for being anti-carbon in the green climate change movement in the United States.

The passion du jour revolves around D.E.I., representing diversity, equity, and inclusion. These areas of emphasis are concerning because the people getting interested in them are massive capital allocators, significant pensions, and prominent asset managers who possess extreme influence over pressuring public companies and what they focus on.

The spirit behind the DEI ESG movement is good, which is that we are excited that business has the opportunity to move society in the direction where more people flourish. Some of those factors they elevate not only don't lead to flourishing, but they also lead to languishing when it comes to a circle to this alternate approach, which is the man if an investor is asking me. They say something like Gosh, we want you to report metrics about how your companies improve your users' lives. Send us this data.

I love that you're interested in the companies we invest in and how our firm shapes society. That's why our founders started their companies in education, learning, human potential, human development, et cetera. They are on a mission to change the world in this area.

That's why our founders started our firm, and I'm a part of Learn Capital. We're excited about how companies can lift people, give them opportunities, and drive them to flourish. We're very similar because we're both excited that business can shape society positively, but the question is, which of those are dialed up or down?

So when we get questions, tell me about your companies. Are your companies themselves running on solar power? Are they monitoring their wastewater runoff? Have they put X number of diverse candidates on the board? That is missing the force for the trees because a way bigger impact on shaping society will be building goods and services that touch not their hundred employees but their million users. So we like asking the same questions. They might ask some of the wrong questions. Still, it's a movement that, whether you're a consumer, an allocator, or an entrepreneur, is a global movement that has spun up very quickly and has big stakes for where our society goes.

Chris Powers: On that note, Evan, it has been an honor to have you on today. Honestly, I admire you for how you approach the world. And I hope that because of you, we see more humans flourish. Thank you. 

Evan Baehr: So fun to be with Chris.

Chris Powers: I hope you've enjoyed this episode of The Fort. Be sure to follow us on your favorite podcast platform or hop over to YouTube to watch full video episodes if that's what you prefer.

For more information, you can check out @thefortpod.com.