Who Actually Gets a Seat at the Table? / Cosmic

Full Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:01:30]: Taylor Stuckert, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Taylor Stuckert [00:01:30]: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Eric Ressler [00:01:35]: So you have a really interesting background — Peace Corps, coming back to rural Ohio where you grew up and seeing a really changed community. And I actually think I want to start there, because you came back to a community that had gone through a pretty big shift. The main employer, DHL I believe, had gone through some big restructuring and there was a lot of disruption in the economy. And my understanding from talking to you and learning about you is that there was this moment where big decisions that really had a major influence on the future of the city were being made essentially behind closed doors — by senators, by corporate leaders. And you said, "No, that's not how we're going to do this." And you took matters into your own hands with a bit of a guerrilla movement-building play. I'd love if you would share that part of your history with our listeners as a way to kick off our interview today.

Taylor Stuckert [00:02:30]: Yeah, absolutely. So the company was DHL, an international shipping company most people probably know about. And Wilmington's unique. It's a small town of about 12,000. If you look at it on a satellite view on Google Maps, you'll see this large airport that physically is about the size of the community. It was an old strategic air command base from the 50s. It closed down in the 70s and then was acquired by a shipping company in the early 80s. Airborne Express grew that incrementally over many years. And then DHL, the largest shipping company in the world, acquired it as the headquarters for its domestic operations in Wilmington, Ohio. Growing up in the community, the airport was always a backdrop. It wasn't anything that stood out the way that a lot of physical, large employers and industrial campuses stand out, because it's an airport.

You'd see a stream of planes flying in on the night sky every night growing up. So it was always just there in the background. You knew people that worked there. I had family that worked there. Maybe because of its slow growth over many years, it wasn't anything that felt like this big splash and then something that just disappeared. It was slowly growing over many years and then it disappeared. So it was a unique situation in that regard. I had been in the Peace Corps and service was disrupted, and I ended up back home really by accident around that time. The national recession was starting. Because of the timing of the announcement, Wilmington was thrusted into the national spotlight — some people would say it was the ground zero of the Great Recession at that time.

I've talked to a lot of colleagues about this, especially in recent years. When we think of impactful issues facing communities, it's very natural today for us to think about community meetings, town halls — these are very relatable environments today. People can picture the viral videos of town halls. And I think we take for granted how new of a concept that is. In New England, they've always had town halls and robust civic engagement, but for most of our communities, large economic decisions, industrial decisions were not things that involved a very democratic process with the broader community. However, when I was in the Peace Corps, that was something we were teaching in our work abroad — the importance of community engagement, of people having a seat at the table and drawing out the vision for the future of the community.

So when I came back home, this big event was happening, and for that conversation to not be happening felt a little odd. I don't think it was unusual at the high-level view — that was actually probably the norm — but it was unusual looking at it through the lens of work we had done through international development. A friend of mine from growing up in Wilmington and I happened to be home at the same time, and we felt that because this was such a profound change for the community, it would make sense for the community to have some voice in that envisioning process for the future. We didn't really have a strong vision for what that should be. It was really about galvanizing a community conversation. So we took what you might call guerrilla tactics — identifying certain popular community gathering spaces or moments to start to initiate that conversation.

We have this holiday parade that takes place every year, the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Thousands of people are in our downtown, and we printed out probably a thousand or more of these little flyers that just said, "Are you mad about the DHL situation? Come to this meeting to talk about the future." We handed them all out, and we didn't really have too much of a plan for what that conversation would look like. We certainly didn't anticipate what ultimately transpired, which was a few hundred people showing up to a meeting. We had several regional news stations that even came. We had to throw this conversation together. For us at the time, it really was about: Wilmington's going through this major economic transition. Where do we see ourselves from an employment standpoint, from a workforce development standpoint, from a community standpoint, where do we see ourselves in this future economy?

It's interesting to look back to 2009. Hindsight's always 20/20, but to think about how in that moment even then, there was a lot of question about what the future of work looked like. What would transpire coming out of the recession? And it feels eerily similar to where we are today as we think about technological disruption, how jobs are going to be impacted by these disruptions, and what are the future skills needed? What are the future job opportunities? What do wages look like? These were a lot of the same questions that we were having and talking about in 2009 as well.

Eric Ressler [00:08:25]: There's a lot of good threads I want to pull on there. We're going to get to your current role as CEO of Lead for America and talk a little bit more about what you're going through right now that I think will relate back to this. But I actually want to hold on something I struggle with a lot personally trying to form a strong opinion about — community input, community co-creation. There's this lionization of that approach in the social impact space, and it's rooted in good reasoning. But I also think there are some negative downsides that can happen when the process gets almost too democratic, to put it in a weird way. The way I think about this showing up is in city council meetings, community convening meetings where there are residents who have a stake in the game, who have really strongly held opinions, but maybe don't see the full picture or have very personal motivations for their opinions.

And then I see process for social change get bogged down. I'm curious about what is the best version of that and what is the worst version of that? One practical example we can talk about is housing supply. In California where I am, there's a very strong state mandate where our cities and counties actually have much less power than they used to around decisions around housing. And yet housing creation is still a major issue, and there are very strong counterpoints to some of this housing supply creation. Some of the criticisms I think are fair, but other times it's really just straight NIMBYism. So community co-creation, community input is a double-edged sword in certain ways. You I think are uniquely qualified to have a strong opinion about this because of your background and your work you do every day. How do you think about that tension?

Taylor Stuckert [00:10:25]: Yeah. I've lived it from every angle of perspective around it, from NIMBYism to now YIMBYism. And I heard a recent one, a new acronym recently called Banana, which was "build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything," something like that.

Eric Ressler [00:10:50]: Never heard that one.

Taylor Stuckert [00:10:50]: Yeah. Which is often what it feels like. I was a regional planning director before this. I was on the front lines of that. I've been through numerous heated city council meetings, heated planning commission meetings about everything from very impactful things based on scale to things that it's really surprising we're having a heated debate about — from the smallest of items like a fence to a full housing development. So I definitely hear you on the upside and downside of that. I felt like I had really developed my thinking on it throughout my time in planning, and really centered it on the belief that you have to invest as much time, energy, and resources in the actual preparatory engagement, community engagement aspect to the work as you do around the issue itself. Proactiveness is everything.

And yet planning so often feels so reactive. Community development work often feels so reactive. All the tensions we're talking about are reactions to an announcement, to a perspective development. We're not doing that civic infrastructure work that's needed to be in place before those big announcements happen. That's the problem — we're always a step behind. I remember we did a big comprehensive plan. It was one of the last major projects I did in the community. It keeps getting referenced by both sides in tense arguments these days. One thing I really set out to do for that process was to build a steering committee that involved mostly people I'd never met before. Clinton County, Ohio is a small county of 42,000 people. It's amazing when you have tens of thousands of people, how easily it can be to think that you know everyone when really you probably know less than 5% of the population.

So I was very intentional about that steering committee and identifying people who did not hold elected office, who were not the typical well-known people that you see in community meetings or at the front of city council conversations, and bringing them to the table. Several of them were people who had just moved to the community. Often that's a tension point — "I've been here my whole life" or "you just moved here, what do you know?" It was a fascinating process. I wouldn't say it was perfect, but it was really interesting how that shifted the dynamic of that process, of the conversation, and ultimately of the adoption of the plan. It actually felt like something that people saw themselves in, that they heard their voice in.

To your point about the upside and the downside, we have to get away from this notion that we're going to make perfect decisions. Everyone always says it: "you're not going to please everyone." That's such a cliche, but yet we still struggle with that notion. You're just not going to please everyone, but that shouldn't take away from how we engage everyone, or at least create opportunities for everyone to be involved in the process.

Eric Ressler [00:14:35]: Yeah. I appreciate your commentary on that. I actually think there's a similar issue I struggle with even leading a small social impact agency — and I can imagine this problem only scales as you grow and you're leading a much bigger team than I am. Similarly, you want to co-create with your team. You want to empower your team, you want your team to have ideas and bring them in good spirit and have decision-making, not just be totally hierarchical and top-down. And yet similarly, there's a time and a place for leadership — for people who are in positions of leadership to make strong choices, even if some people disagree with those choices. I see this as a similar metaphor to co-creating with the community. There's a similar scope and scale where you're co-creating within an organization that I think a lot of executive directors and CEOs are grappling with.

To me, it feels like a different flavor of the same tension and the same balance that needs to be reached. Honestly, that's something I continue to struggle with as a leader. I've been running Cosmic for 16 years at this point. I've tried more democratic, less democratic processes — flatter structures, more opinionated leadership. And I still don't think I've found the golden solution to that. It's something that feels always a little bit fluid, maybe depending on the season we're in as an organization. Are we in a growth mode? Are we in a consolidation mode? Where are we in the process? I'd be curious — does that parallel resonate with you from a leadership standpoint? How do you think about that as you're running your organization as a CEO?

Taylor Stuckert [00:16:20]: Well, one thing I want to touch on too — the head of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Dame Louise Richardson, brilliant person. A lot of her background was focused around domestic terrorism in Ireland. She's from Ireland, and she talks a lot about the influence and the impact of binary framing in society as it relates to acts of aggression and violence. Going back to the community voice piece of it and thinking about it even from an organizational standpoint, through a variety of ways and factors, we have put ourselves in this position where everything is a binary choice. When we think of even — does the community have a voice, have they participated? It's not a binary situation. It's not yes or no.

One of the things I think about a lot lately, as you were talking about that being lionized in the social impact sector, is that that often surfaces. And yet we never really question what does it even mean — was the community involved or did they have a voice? Did we engage? Who is the community? And we act as if the community is this unified object that has complete consensus, and you're either engaging them or you're not. And that's just so inaccurate to reality. Leadership is really that responsibility of hearing and listening and analyzing the landscape and hearing the multitude of voices of the community, recognizing that there's a pluralism in community and bearing the responsibility of making challenging decisions based on the data and the observations and the information that they're seeing in these situations. That's why sometimes I don't even like the notion of "we're not going to please everyone," as if pleasing is the basis of all decision-making or tough decision-making. We put ourselves in these binary corners of "you either pleased or you're displeased," and that's just not often how it shakes out.

So when I talk to people who are coming up in their career all the time, I will say that I was thrust into a leadership role. I found myself leading a regional planning agency without a ton of serious management experience. And then I've continued to stay in a management or executive type position since that time. One of the things I realized when I stepped into that role was how much I gave up in terms of the hands-on work I was doing. I no longer was able to do the map-making or the design work that I really enjoyed doing. Now I was doing budgeting and management decisions and HR-type stuff — things I never imagined were a part of the equation. But we are trained to see all careers as a ladder that leads to an executive role.

I've accepted that I've been in that role now long enough that I've acquired a lot of the skillsets and the necessary lived experience to navigate it well, but I'm not sure if I would've followed that path again if I was given the choice. Because what comes with it is that responsibility of imperfect decision-making and dealing with a pluralism of voices and data and information, and never feeling like you're really making a perfect decision. For us, naturally, that can be a challenge — you want to feel this sense of closure in decision-making. Sometimes it can happen in certain moments when you have a certain level of consensus or a process that feels fulfilling or satisfying of all the voices involved, but it's maybe rarer than we think it is.

Eric Ressler [00:20:45]: Yeah. I imagine that almost everyone listening to the show who's in any form of a leadership or management position can relate to that. I think that is a healthy challenge. I completely relate to "I never feel like I make a perfect decision." Even that framing is probably a little bit of a misnomer. As I've been doing this work longer and learning from other leaders, I'm always so impressed and inspired by leaders who find a way to sit in that discomfort and yet still have conviction and move quickly — not in a reckless way, but in a confident way — and accept that they're always going to be a student in life at some level. That's a lot easier to say than to actually do, especially when real people's lives and livelihoods are at stake, either just your employees or because of the type of work that we're doing where the stakes are high at certain points.

We're not talking about, in this space, "are we going to cut 15% of our highly paid tech workers?" — not to diminish the livelihood impacts of that for the tech worker class — but we're talking about: "is this intervention going to hit underserved communities harder than we anticipate, or actually backfire in a way that is exactly opposite to the stated mission of our organization?" The stakes are much higher, and often the resources to have the right evidence, the right tools at our disposal to make those decisions as best as we can, might also not be ideal. It's a really challenging situation.

Hey friends, real quick before we continue today's episode — I'm Eric Ressler, founder and creative director at Cosmic. Cosmic is a creative agency purpose-built for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. For the last 15 years, we've helped leaders like you nail your impact story and sharpen your strategy. But we're not here to just leave you with a fancy slide deck and a pat on the back. We roll up our sleeves and help you bring our ideas to life through campaigns, creative, and digital experiences. Our work together helps you earn trust, connect deeply with your supporters, and grow your fundraising and your impact. If you value the thinking we share here and want it applied to your biggest challenges, let's talk at designbycosmic.com. All right, back to today's conversation.

I feel like I'd like to transition, and this is a good time, into your experience coming in as the CEO of Lead for America — not being a founder for the organization, but inheriting a CEO role, which is another identity shift. We're going to talk a little bit about identity and narrative today. I'd love if you could just share a little bit of background on how that happened, what that experience has been like, and how you have stepped into that role as a leader inheriting an organization.

Taylor Stuckert [00:23:50]: Yeah. So I have been a founder of a nonprofit, and I feel like I can relate to the identity attachment that comes with founding something. I try to hold that carefully. I know firsthand what that attachment can feel like. I try to be very respectful and caring of the attachment that the individuals that started this organization, that got it off the ground, hold for it. I carry that with me as I do my work. I make sure I'm thinking about that and being considerate of being a steward of this mission — just stewarding it while I have it — that ultimately someone else will likely take it and leave their fingerprints on it as well. Having had that experience, I probably care for it a little more carefully than somebody that maybe hadn't founded something before.

My style, in just about anything — whether it's work or personal life — and something I've kind of dialed in on over the years, is really a listen-first approach to just about everything I do. I do try to ensure that I'm giving the appropriate amount of attention and thought and consideration to those that help construct things, those that feel part of things. That can be anything from the founders of the organization to the staff past or present. For us in particular, as a service organization, we have a lot of individuals who have passed through in a fellowship role and are now alumni. Hearing their experience and understanding what this mission means to them and holding that, while also inviting them to be a part of the continued evolution of the mission. I took that very seriously, and it felt right for me — just because of that experience and that approach — to come into a role like this where I'm not the founder of the organization. I don't have that specific niche story that was often told over and over again as the impetus or the foundation for the existence of this mission.

But I've also been able to care for that and continue to grow and evolve that mission. This goes back to the conversation about who is the community when we talk about engaging the community. Is it a fixed group of people or is it a dynamic group of people that changes over time? My belief is that it's always dynamic, and that the people coming into the work at this moment do have agency and do have say over what this mission means and how they're going to contribute to it. So it's a balancing of holding onto the past in a respectful and caring and considerate way — not losing sight of what people put in terms of sweat equity and care into this mission — but being a good steward and doing that, while also looking at current conditions and future horizons for where this work is going, and trying to steward the work in a direction that is sustainable, that is authentic, and is responsive to the world we live in today.

Eric Ressler [00:27:40]: When we were prepping for this interview — and a little bit of time has passed since we did that — you mentioned that you were in the process of going through a strategic narrative shift at Lead for America. Catch me up on where you're at there and what was the impetus for that. How do you think about that in terms of identity, community, all of the topics we're discussing here, and engaging your team in doing that?

Taylor Stuckert [00:28:05]: So again, I'm very comfortable looking at the past and recognizing it as a moment in time. Sometimes people get uncomfortable with the sense that when we talk about the past and we make shifts or recalibrate, that we're saying that what they did was wrong. That's never how I see it. I see it as just a moment in time. When this organization was founded, it's an era I can totally relate to, because I was a part of that community. I was not involved in Lead for America, but it was an era in which a lot of books and research and articles were put out about the brain drain issue and about the loss of young people from the heartland. That really was the origin impetus for this work — you had a group of college-age students who had been from smaller communities all across the country, from Kansas to Oklahoma to Minnesota, Kentucky.

They were in college and they were looking at the landscape of fellowship opportunities, and they all were taking them to New York or DC or Silicon Valley. There really weren't any opportunities to do a fellowship in the heartland or in a small community. They wanted to change that. They wanted to create opportunities for that. It's very noble. It's very relatable to me as somebody who moved to New York City and then came back to Ohio. But over time, as I spent a lot of time in Ohio and the Midwest, I really came to see that narrative as just one piece of the story, and a small piece. It's definitely not telling the whole story about these communities and the future of these places. Returners are important. Brain drain is something communities should care about, just from the standpoint of: are we inviting the young people that we raise to stay here, but are we also giving them the opportunities to flourish and do the things they want to do?

But that narrative leaves out, I would say, obviously the majority of the population. Returners and brain drain make up a small percentage of the human capital that makes the community thrive. I noticed that in my own work before Lead for America — that we're talking about a very small subset of individuals. As I came into this organization, I was very interested in expanding the tent, not just for that conversation, but for national service as a field. National service is something that does skew young, 18 to 24. I totally support a lot of the folks that are still adamant that this is the springboard for young people, and I agree with that. But I also think people spring at different times of life. Some people spring mid-career, they might spring into retirement. Service should be an opportunity that truly is open for all.

For a lot of our communities, we need everyone we can get and we should welcome anyone that wants to step forward. As I transitioned into this role, I was really interested in taking a step back and thinking about where is our mission and narrative really centered. Historically, the centering was on the individual service fellow that came through the program — their journey, what I was describing in the founders, that they got to do this fellowship and where did it take them from there. I really thought that is just a piece of the story and not the beginning and the end. The centering should be on the places we're serving in this work. What is happening to the communities we're supporting and partnering with in this journey? That really was the main shift — to focus our work on activating local talent and building the leadership pipelines that communities need to realize their own unique visions.

We're not going to tell a community what their vision should be. We're not going to describe or prescribe to them what talent looks like, that it's an 18- to 24-year-old that went to this very prestigious school. It could look very different in one community. We're going to let communities really be step in step on building what leadership pipelines look like to them. That was the main shift, and that's where we have recentered our work, recalibrated our work. As we look ahead, we're taking a step back. I talk a lot about — one of the things I was pleased by when I came into the national nonprofit world was that one of the universal consensus that I felt like I could see was everybody would always nod their head when somebody would say something to the effect of, "you've seen one community, you've seen one community." We all sort of agree that communities are these very distinct, individualized things that at a certain level have similarities across the board, but we don't arrange social sector interventions and even philanthropy in many ways at a national level to be aligned to that.

It works at the local level, it works at the regional level, but at a national level we really have a hard time doing that — about how we measure impact, how we tell that story, how we fund it. It is hard. It's more challenging. But that's really where I personally, and I think as an organization, we want to be — in that challenging space, because that's where the work happens. That's where innovation happens.

Eric Ressler [00:34:00]: Yeah. Tell me more about how you think about that with regards to — you guys are in local communities in the day-to-day work, and yet you are this national organization. Is it chapter-based? Is it cohort-based? Is it place-based? How do you get the best of both worlds? We do work with orgs like this that have districts or chapters, but then there is this kind of parent umbrella organization that provides the infrastructure, the backbone, the cross-learnings. What's your version of that at Lead for America?

Taylor Stuckert [00:34:35]: Yeah. I came to look at it through my own lens as a local practitioner first, and for many years, about what was I missing in that regard? I was the person on the ground. I knew the community well. I didn't need a national nonprofit to come in and say, "I should do this, this, or that." What I was missing — and I think what LFA is focused on providing — was that I didn't have the bandwidth to provide the administrative infrastructure that was needed to provide a fellowship opportunity to one or two individuals. That's a lot to ask for. I wasn't going to apply for a federal grant so that I could have one or two fellows working in my regional planning agency. The other thing was — I was very fortunate, so it wasn't specifically for me, but I saw the benefit of it — to have been a part of a national dialogue. Because of the spotlighting around the DHL situation, I was very privileged to be a part of national panels about the future of small towns and rural communities.

I took a lot from that. I loved being a part of those conversations and bringing that knowledge back to my community, bringing those connections back to my community and those resources back to my community. That's something that I feel any local practitioner should want — to feel connected to the country at large, and not feel that they're working by themselves at the local level with nobody to relate to. Providing that national cohort model gives our participants who do our fellowship, but also the host site communities that we work with, the opportunity to be a part of something beyond their community. There's these indirect, maybe even direct effects of that — especially as somebody who has worked in a rural part of the country, having exposure to other communities, to other practitioners, whether they're in other rural communities or non-rural communities, is such an eye-opener and is such an important piece of knowledge to share with the community you're working in. From a civic bridging opportunity, I think it's a great way to bring people together from across the country doing similar work for places that they care about specifically.

Eric Ressler [00:37:00]: We're in another moment right now that at least feels like we're on the precipice of another major technological disruption that's going to have impacts to the workforce, to careers, to starting and raising families. I'm speaking broadly about AI here, but I think other technologies as well. I'm not going to ask you to predict a future about what happens there — I don't think anyone knows exactly what's going to happen here. But what I would like to ask you is: what is the sentiment within these communities, especially within young people, where one of the stories that we're hearing — and maybe even starting to see come true — is that quote-unquote entry-level positions are going to be some of the first to be most exposed to some of these new technological disruptions. You've led organizations and towns and communities through major change from an economic standpoint before. How do you think about those major disruptions and how to plan for them and how we can best support culture change at that scale?

Taylor Stuckert [00:38:10]: Yeah. What pains me the most about it is that I'm not that old, but I feel like I keep living through these crazy moments where I keep thinking to myself, when are we going to learn? Coming out of the recession, all the stuff I was saying about the proactive civic infrastructure building that we need to do — I think would have really served us well in this moment. Unfortunately, we're just not there. I wish that we were. The thing I've learned over the years is to know that we don't know, and to avoid some of these binary framings that we go into — that either AI is all good or it's all bad. I really don't operate there. There's a ton of positive opportunity. There's a lot of things communities should be thinking about and how they're going to address it in their own unique way.

For me, there's still a lot of things that aren't settled on this conversation. I felt that early on, last summer, last fall, as data centers were being built. Where the developments are happening just so happen to be a lot of the places where the digital divide is at its greatest. You're talking about places where big shifts are happening, big infrastructure being developed in communities where a lot of people still don't have access to a laptop. They still don't know what a keyboard and a mouse is. They have never done a telehealth appointment, and now they're hearing about this new disruptive thing that the rest of us are ready to move on to. A few things come to mind for me. One is, this transformation is not going to happen in a healthy way if we don't have this human infrastructure to support communities in making that transition.

If we want older adults to be using telehealth, they have to have a broadband connection, they have to have a device that they can use, and they have to have the digital skills to know how to use it. If we really want to get the most out of the economic opportunity potential from AI, we have to have a country where everybody has the basic digital skills and the basic access opportunities to deploy those skills to get the most out of it. We would be selling the opportunity short for anything less than that. I worry that if we try to moonshot past all of those things, we're leaving the door open for political disruption that's not going to serve anyone in the end as far as national progress goes, if we just leave it to that. It would be a misfortune if we just closed our eyes, covered our ears, and just hoped that everybody got it and was okay with it.

Eric Ressler [00:41:35]: Yeah. I think that's fair. I'm under-impressed so far with how little AI is being considered for social innovation and social impact work. It's happening at the individual practitioner level. The nonprofit space gets a lot of criticism for being slow to adopt technology, but I'm actually seeing — and there's some data to support — that nonprofits are actually adopting AI more quickly than the private sector at large, which has its pros and cons. But to your point, yeah, we're talking about this new transformative technology when a certain percentage of our population right here in America still doesn't even have access to the internet in a meaningful way or the skills to use it effectively. I grew up as the internet was growing up. I had access to the internet very early. I was lucky in certain ways for that. In other ways, maybe not so lucky.

I worry that the internet has actually been in certain ways a net negative on society — especially when you see the polarization and how much hate and disagreement there is in our country right now. I don't think the internet is solely responsible for that, but I think it is a big part of that equation. My fear is, will we see something similar happen with AI where it just creates an even bigger digital divide, even bigger divides in terms of class and wealth in America, where the most privileged and the wealthy of us are able to have even more leverage because of AI, and the people who are most at need or need more help or lack those resources — there's this technology that in theory could help them move up in life, but instead is going to just hold them down.

I don't know. There's just so much going on with it. I don't think anyone knows. But your story is poignant around these data centers that are using resources, water, electricity, et cetera, being built in these communities where a good portion of people don't even have access to last generation's technological innovation. Big issue, big equity issue. Not here to be an AI hater whatsoever. I think it has a lot of transformative potential. We use it all the time in constructive ways, even in our work today. But I do think this is a place where social innovation should be getting more attention than it is. I hope that leaders in our space can start to make a case for that and participate in it, and that the AI providers do a better job of ensuring we're not just looking at how we can code things faster, but also how we can apply this technology to some of the things that we were promised early on in this vision they painted around medicine and health, and even universal basic income — was this thing that was talked about really early and doesn't seem to be talked about nearly as much as part of the AI disruption story.

Taylor Stuckert [00:44:30]: Yeah. It's hard. I'm in a lot of conversations where each one of those points gets brought up, and I still struggle with just the reality I see on the ground, which is — I'm plugged into this national community that's talking about this very futurist vision of AI, but people around me are really just focused on this square box that's being built in the middle of a cornfield. Those are just such divergent situations and realities. As a country, we're in a position to really hopefully try to merge those two divergent realities, to bring people along with this opportunity and ensure that — we only get the most out of it when we have people participating and have the capability and agency to participate. I remain hopeful that that's the direction we ultimately go as a national community, that we are able to merge those divergences and ensure that this is something that is about widespread impact.

Scale is the main distinguisher for AI — how fast it's grown, how quickly it has spread. There's really no reason that it shouldn't bring people along. It shouldn't leave people behind, versus the digital infrastructure of yesteryear, which was fiber and broadband infrastructure that does take longer to spread and more investment and work to build. This is something that spreads much more rapidly. So we need to be doing a better job of equipping people and communities to ensure that they can positively benefit from it.

Eric Ressler [00:46:35]: So before we wrap up, I want to ask one other thing. As a leader — and I think all leaders can relate to this in one way or another — sometimes it's a grind. Sometimes the work is hard, sometimes it's difficult, especially when we're trying to grapple with these existential technologies or major cultural shifts that are happening, or even just get through a community meeting when we're really trying to do our best job to listen. What in your life keeps you energized about this work, keeps you going, helps you wake up every day and not burn out when especially things get tough?

Taylor Stuckert [00:47:05]: I think for me, I try to be present in these moments. I try not to dwell too much on the past or feel too overwhelmed about the future, to remain grounded in the present and recognize that for as much as we read articles and studies and information and listen to podcasts, that they're just signals. It's not a tablet coming down from on high that's telling us what the future is. I still believe that the future is unwritten, and that we are the authors of that story. What keeps me going through the grind and being hopeful — I love hearing what our individual service members are doing across the country. They're not the ones that are on podcasts being spotlighted often, but they're the ones that are sitting with that older adult, showing them how to use telehealth technology.

They're sitting with a group of folks from the community going through AI images and quizzing them on what's real and what's not real. Those little things that are going to be critical for us to bring people along, that's the work that gives me goosebumps. Whatever I can do to provide the resources or the means, the mission framing that enables that work to happen, that's what motivates me. I think that the future is largely unwritten. They're the ones that are writing it in community, and I'm just here to support them.

Eric Ressler [00:48:45]: I think that's a beautiful note to end on today. Taylor, thank you so much for joining me. This is great.

Taylor Stuckert [00:48:50]: Yeah, thank you, Eric. Appreciate you having me on.

Eric Ressler [48:30]: If you enjoyed today's video, please be sure to hit like and subscribe or even leave us a comment. It really helps. Thank you. And thank you for all that you do for your cause and for being part of the movement to move humanity and the planet forward.

Full Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:01:30]: Taylor Stuckert, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for joining me today.

Taylor Stuckert [00:01:30]: Yeah, thanks for having me.

Eric Ressler [00:10:50]: Never heard that one.

Eric Ressler [00:48:45]: I think that's a beautiful note to end on today. Taylor, thank you so much for joining me. This is great.

Taylor Stuckert [00:48:50]: Yeah, thank you, Eric. Appreciate you having me on.

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Who Actually Gets a Seat at the Table?

Notable Quotes:

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Full Transcript:

Stay Connected

Most of Your Brand Strategy is a Waste of Time

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