Seth: [00:00:00] So I would certainly say don’t give up your friends. But do not underestimate this importance of these middle ring relationships and the single best place for them is where you live in the streets around your home and the institutions that are ideally place specific, neighborhood specific.

Nina: We’re saying the same thing. I agree that I do think people underrate community and how important it is. You have to participate in it, though. not everyone has to be a leader, but it also is nice to have people who are joiners

Seth: Showing up, showing up, showing,

Nina: Welcome to Dear Nina, Conversations About Friendship. I’m your host, Nina Badzin. I’ve been writing about friendship for over 10 years, and I also have a lot I like to talk about in terms of community, but I don’t spend as much time on the community side of friendship because they’re different actually and we get into that in this episode. I have a really fascinating guest today.

Seth Kaplan is a leading expert on fragile [00:01:00] states, societies, and communities. And he is the author of Fragile Neighborhoods: Repairing American Society, One Zip Code at a Time. He is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins. He’s a consultant to organizations such as the World Bank, U. S. State Department, United States Institute of Peace. He’s done a lot of really interesting things all over the world and within the U. S. His book is really fascinating. I will have that linked as well. Highly recommend it for having a real understanding of what a fragile state means, both in a country and in a neighborhood. Seth really says it better than I do. So we’re going to get to him in just a moment. I just hope that this episode makes you think about your neighborhood, other people’s neighborhoods,

Here he is, Seth Kaplan, author of Fragile Neighborhoods.

Nina: Seth, I’m so happy to talk to you in person. Welcome to Dear Nina.

Seth: I’m thrilled to be here, Nina. Thank you so much.

Nina: There are so many books out there now and podcasts, including mine [00:02:00] about friendship and connection. Yours really comes at it from the most original angle I’ve seen. Can you explain what you do, what you have done, what brought you to this conclusion about neighborhoods?

Seth: just imagine my day job is not American. My day job is working in fragile states, and I’ve been doing that for many years. my first book was Fixing Fragile States, and I have worked on 35 countries. I’m talking Syria, I’m talking Nigeria, I’m talking Libya, and I co manage a non profit in about a dozen countries.

I never thought I would work on the U. S., but 2015, 2016, I live in Washington, people know me as the fragile states person. they started asking me, without me prompting them, people at a coffee or when they would meet me. Is the U. S. becoming fragile? And this was partly in jest, but clearly there was a lot of anxiety there.

And when this happened once I didn’t think too much about it, but when it happened seven or eight times over some months, I’m saying, this is a signal, [00:03:00] this is something I need to explore more. And so then I spent several years reading a lot, traveling a lot, do what I would do for any new country, take a journey, because I don’t believe you know a country just from books and hotels and meetings, you got to get out there and see the country, understand the country.

I did that. since my lens, what always makes my work different than most people is that I focus on social dynamics. I focus on relationships. Someone looks at a country and says, what is the policy that they need to do? I look at a country and say, what is the health of their relationships? And the stronger, the social health, the stronger the relationships in a country, the more likely that country will solve its problems, address challenges and get on the right trajectory. So when people ask me about the U. S. and I started to explore it, my immediate lens was relationships, and then we can discuss how I got from there to neighborhoods if you want.

Nina: Yeah, let’s do it. Let’s just keep [00:04:00] going.

Seth: When I first started, I literally organized a social capital group. I had people come together in Washington, DC. This of course is where I’m based people from think tanks and other things, eventually started bringing people from around the country. the lesson that I learned was if you’re asking what is wrong with the U S. politically. And then we’re talking about, well, politics, but then you’re also looking problems of trust, problems of polarization.

We have a lot of other social problems. We have people dying from drug overdose, a hundred thousand a year. We have mental health. We have depression. We have Jonathan Haidt writing about kids are not out playing. And I did some writing for his Substack. So we have all these different issues.

And these are issues that are all about relationships, and yet these issues did not exist two generations ago. So the really big question which I started my book and my work with is, what has changed? If we did not have these problems two generations ago, and we have them now, again, I’m thinking from [00:05:00] systems, systemic thinking, I’m not thinking myself or individuals, I’m thinking what happened to our social health that we used to have when we don’t have?

And if you look at it, it’s not with the politics because our constitution hasn’t changed. It’s not necessarily on the, broadly speaking, the non profit or the corporate or the economy, but what you do see is enormous decay in local institutions, local gathering, and in the social connections. And people’s lives, they have their household, they have their job and much that was there before their relationships, their connection in to certain different organizations, it’s all been decimated, and I’m not the first one to say that. Of course, Robert Putnam bowling alone is 25 years ago, but I think what people don’t do is create a framework to think about these problems and a framework that provides a way to address these problems.

So my framework is the neighborhood. If you just think about the neighborhood, what it used [00:06:00] to be to what it is, you see what’s missing, and then you can begin to think about what we need to do to create a, what I would call a socially rich society, a society where all of us, or the great majority of us, have socially rich lives. And that is what we don’t have today.

Nina: I really like the expression in your book, Social Poverty. it’s one of those expressions, you know exactly what you mean when you say it and it doesn’t matter your income level, you can have, as you point out in your book, and it’s so true, you could be in the most wealthy of neighborhoods and be socially poor, both in people don’t leave their house.

And I, this is way before the pandemic, although that, of course, made it so much worse that this idea that you don’t have to leave home to do anything, how much blame do you put on social media? And phones in general,

Seth: So I think it’s easy to sit here in 2025 and say, the problem is the phone, but I would say the phone is the latest wave of many, many waves of technological change. I think the starting [00:07:00] point Is the car and the television. And then you’ve got a lot of other things that have changed in our society.

The phone is the latest iteration, the latest wave, and it does exasperate. But if you look at the trends, I think some of the political trends get accelerated in 2012, but all the social trends, they’re going much further back. the peak of social health arguably is 1964. That’s right out of the data. And then it’s been more or less on a downward trajectory since then. But the big change you saw was the car. The car, and I would say with that is we changed the landscape in which we lived. The institutions began to change.

And when I think of this problem, I think it’s something about how we’ve shaped the country in terms of physically and institutionally. like we were talking before about schools. If you look at a map of the way neighborhoods or the physical landscape was, built out, let’s say up until the sixties or fifties, I [00:08:00] couldn’t give you the exact point.

Neighborhoods were built, and I can remember when I grew up, I walked to my primary school, high school is a bit further away, a little bit different, but my primary school was, I don’t know, three or four blocks away. Everybody walked. It literally had this very important, uh, like a center point of the neighborhood.

And everything was built around it. we played with each other on the block. we had some relationships with our teachers and everything. Most of that is not the same today. You don’t, walk to shop. You don’t walk to school, wherever you go to your house of worship. Everything has been changed. So all those local institutions, they’re not everywhere gone, but they’re gone in a lot of places.

Nina: I definitely walked to school also. what’s Seth’s referring to is before we start recording, we talked a little bit about different schools, my four kids have gone to and different Education systems. One thing I did not tell you and I’m curious what you think about it. I want to tell you something about Minnesota. In Minnesota they have open enrollments for public school. So you can live anywhere you want, You [00:09:00] can go to any public school if that school has space for you. And then of course, there’s the caveat, you have to be able to get your kid there. it technically is supposed to help you not be sort of trapped with no choices.

But if you can’t physically get there, you, that’s not really a choice for you. So I can see how it can improve and give people options of schools. On the other hand, it’s pretty common to have kids in a neighborhood going to all kinds of schools, not just private schools, let’s say, but public schools all over the place. Then you also go to that school, perhaps, and you might make a bunch of friends who don’t live anywhere near you, which was probably just not something that was common. I don’t know if any other

Seth: I, I don’t think people, so the thing is, obviously there’s trade offs. If you’re trying to give people choice, if you’re trying to create some competition in education, if we’re trying to help families that live in a neighborhood with not a very good school, we can think of that as a good policy choice.

On the other hand, if schools are the best incubator of relationships, thinking of schools in a [00:10:00] very technical vocational manner means that you’re undermining their role in society.

And so that would be one downside. Another downside is if there’s place based inequality and this whole country is enormous, this is a wealthy neighborhood, this is a poor neighborhood. if you make school choice the main avenue to address that, I think what you find is You basically have an excuse not to make the neighborhoods that are not doing well better. that’s not easy, it takes a certain type of skill set, knowledge, strategy, a lot of things have to go right for that to happen, but we tend to think the way to address inequality Is to help the best, the most talented people in the worst places escape, but that basically means that we, in many ways, we increase inequality by drawing the best talent out to maybe a better school.

And then the people left behind end up with the, not the very good school and not the very good environment in the [00:11:00] neighborhood. And we have an excuse not to fix those problems. And that I think is what we see happening in so many ways, not only through the schools.

Nina: Well, how else do you see it other than I schools?

Seth: We’ll just think about when we think about how we help even someone who’s not doing well. We offer them opportunity. And that opportunity is very, it’s not only about the kids. If you’re a young adult and some program helps you get a new job. the whole concept of success in our country is about getting out.

That’s like the concept. So it’s not only the kids, it’s any talented person. I mean, it works at a neighborhood level. I think it also works at a larger level because this is why we have many parts of our country. You live in Minnesota. Minnesota has done relatively well, but think about how many parts of our country we basically drained talent from these places. There are reasons why people would leave, but because we tend to concentrate opportunity, concentrate the best institution schools. A lot of places get left [00:12:00] behind.

Nina: Yeah, I can see that. It’s so depressing a little bit if you when you really think about the enormity of the problem.

Seth: so hard. It’s so hard to, I mean, we’re talking about so many different issues laying on top of each other, but the key thing is this great differences. I mean, when I talk about neighborhoods, I really talk about two problems. One is place based inequality and two disconnection. And in some ways they’re the same problem because disconnection, you’re materially well off in your neighborhood and your problem is social poverty.

That’s relatively easy, but you can think of economic poverty as partly a product of disconnection. Weak institutions, , there’s not businesses in your neighborhood. There’s not institutions like schools that are strong enough to lift you up. Could be problems of families or inter family weak social capital between families.

And all of those are also institutions and problems of disconnection. So if you think of disconnection more broadly than we typically do, you can argue that many, many, even economic [00:13:00] problems are a product of disconnection.

Nina: no, I see that and you wrote something in one of your after babble pieces for Jonathan Haidt’s Substack that Made me feel like, okay, we can maybe offer my listeners something. And you wrote “the social changes that have affected neighborhood communities here in the U S are significant, but not insurmountable.”

So that moves us to maybe the hope. Cause in your book too, I know you address some things that can be done. that’s a big question, but, what are some of the things you find yourself suggesting to the individual? To, you know, somebody’s listening to this and they’re like, okay, I, yeah, I agree. I don’t really know my neighbors. I don’t feel like any connection to where I live at all. Like, what can that person do?

Seth: So we can think about this for individuals. We can think about this in terms of the larger for individuals. Again, if we’re talking about bringing people together and increasing our, let’s say neighborhood social wealth.

Let’s suppose that’s our goal. I would say the easiest thing to do is find another person or [00:14:00] 2 and organize something. I mean, a block party. That’s not a tall lift, or you yourself can go and say, there’s an exercise I see that you look at the eight doors near you. Maybe it’s a couple of doors to your side, a couple of doors across the street. There’s eight doors. You could think six doors. Do you know who’s behind those doors? Can you yourself go over whether it’s informally on the street or knock on the door or something so you can either as an individual, Go meet people, or as an individual, you could find a couple of people in your neighborhood, and maybe you co organize something.

I do think If it’s just beyond your immediate neighbors, it really helps to have an ally and work with someone, partly because you’re building a relationship with that person, but also it seems so much less daunting. So that’s one. Two, you can look for a local institution and you can think, is there a volunteer opportunity?

Can I reach out to them and say, I like what you do? [00:15:00] Or could we do something related to your mission that would be good for the neighborhood? Can we have a gathering? You know, so many organizations exist, and they’re very siloed. very simply, you could be like a food pantry.

But you could also be a food pantry that built community. I visited one of these in North Carolina a few months ago, they started just giving people food in the, in the, it’s like a town, so it wasn’t quite a neighborhood, but not such a larger place. And now they’re actually doing a lot of things that are community building for the whole town.

And so one thing is find an institution with a civic, religious, whatever you’re involved with, can they take a neighborhood lens or a community building lens and lean into this aspect of the work and what role can you play? I think the third thing you can do again, it depends how ambitious you are.

Can you find a few allies? Could you just create something? Because ultimately, even if you started with a couple of events [00:16:00] or you started volunteering, could you create a neighborhood something or a local something that would sustain itself do more than just one off? Take it upon its mission that we’re going to try to bring people together.

Again, it can be very incremental. We don’t have to do a lot. But when you go from an activity to an institution, an institution has a staying power, tends to have a little bit more ambition. So even if you started, it may not even be formal, but let’s suppose we are the neighborhood whatever. Then you start doing things once, then maybe it comes every few months. Then it becomes our mission is to bring people together. So I would say that is the most ambitious. And yet, if you did it slowly, it would not be too ambitious.

Nina: I had brought it to individual, but I think you were still really thinking bigger,

Seth: I think bigger because , my work is mostly not with individuals. My work is mostly countries, societies. So I’m thinking if you’re the city, there are cities, for [00:17:00] example, Boston has a, again, it’s not a big budget.

It’s an office of only a couple people, maybe. they literally have a program to build social connection in place. And what that means is typically small grant programs. And then some events, for example, they had something on block parties. They had something last year around Halloween, which is what the typically one of the few holidays in which people actually go out and about. So how could Halloween be celebrated in a way that would bring neighbors together? And so they basically gave small grants. and some cities are more ambitious. Edmonton literally has an office with four people that basically took over what, what one individual had done at one point, and that he actually works for the city now, he started on his own, basically social connections, they have block leaders, they have neighborhood connectors, and they try, systematically have people Across the city that they try to [00:18:00] activate again.

It’s all volunteer, except for the city officials. But the idea is to activate what we might call neighborhood or social animators. And I use the word animate on purpose. I don’t think we use it this way. Neighborhood activators or animators who try to bring people together. So this, there’s many things cities can do.

California has a, I think a two year program to try to get people to volunteer in place. also a way to connect people if you’re thinking about inequality, Atlanta has the most neighborhood centric, effort to try to address inequality, they literally in Atlanta, especially because it’s had many neighborhood revitalization efforts.

And it spawned a specific organization that works on this issue in many parts of the country. I think there are about 25 neighborhoods, but the city itself has, an initiative under the current mayor to look at six neighborhoods. They very strategically chose the six and they are [00:19:00] systematically working to turn neighborhoods that are failing.

I mean, this is economically, socially, literally there’s decay. empty lots and abandoned properties in these neighborhoods. To turn these neighborhoods around. Cities, states, there’s a lot of things you can do at a policy level that makes a difference. And we’re not even talking about the underlying systemic reason we’re, we’re being drawn apart from each other, but at least this gives you some very practical things that could be done in the short term.

Nina: It’s such a good reminder who your local people are, that’s who you should pay the most attention to. Your local, local, hyper local, the people who can help where you live, Now, not, always so high level.

Seth: When I walk around my neighborhood, there’s hundreds of people. I may not know them well, I have a sense of joy. I feel like there’s a security or a safety blanket wrapped around me when I’m in my neighborhood. So it just changes my whole outlook on life because I’m in this space. my street is two blocks long. I’m at [00:20:00] 910 and I can think of a woman down the street. I think not many people would notice her. She’s not very talkative.

I see her knocking on doors of people living alone. I see her organizing the cleanup in the park. I see her as the person of contact when there’s something for a local charity. Sometimes you go in front of her house and there’s piles of this used clothes, all people dropped off. I mean, that’s one example. , I can point to all these different people and we always talk about leadership, but when you’re in a very active community, it’s like everyone is a leader.

It may be a leader in different ways. I’m thinking of the teenagers that are mentoring the younger kids. I’m thinking of we have lots of WhatsApp groups in my neighborhood. So there’s a WhatsApp group. I was in Denver last year. I gave a talk right after the talk, I finished I’m hanging around in the back and I see on one of the WhatsApp groups, that’s pretty quiet.

Someone’s kid is missing, asking for help. with no one’s calling the police or the government, people are saying, let’s volunteer, let’s organize. And within, [00:21:00] let’s say an hour or something, they had, they’d started a separate WhatsApp group, which I had to follow, even though I was in Denver. I’m talking about a neighborhood outside of Washington.

25 people volunteer. They wanted to figure this out before the sun came down. It was probably around October. And boom, they’re going in every direction. And we have a lot of wooded areas within 90 minutes of starting the search, they had found the kid.

And then everyone’s on the chat. someone picked me up. I went through the woods and I’m in the next neighborhood. the whole thing is over, like start to finish in three hours. for me, it was like a microcosm of living in a neighborhood in which there’s a security or safety blanket. They’re just motivated. It’s the norm to stand up and do something. And it’s the norm to know your neighbors. You have peace of mind.

Everyone is involved in everyone else’s life. Sort of not in a negative way. If you don’t want to engage, you don’t have to engage. But it’s really transformational in terms of your outlook, in terms of your social life, in [00:22:00] some ways, be free because your kids can be more free.

You can depend upon other people. I’m going away. Can somebody come and check my house. It’s just hard to describe unless you’re in the middle of it. To be honest.

Nina: it’s something to aspire to and I really try to talk a lot on my show about the difference between Community and friendship. They are different. I really focus on friendship a lot that’s what my show is about but I urge people a lot to be part of a community is just as important and it’s different.

The community I think is what you’re describing. It’s also something that can be found in a religious type of organization. It’s the place that I describe it as. I wonder if you think of it this way, it’s happening without you. that community.

Nina: So I think about my husband goes, uh, every week to synagogue. You know, I don’t always go. Sometimes I just stay home, do my thing. That service is happening with or without him, but they notice if he’s not there, they’re happy. He’s there. That’s the community, but it’s happening kind of above you. It’s not happening just because of you or just for you.[00:23:00]

And I think it’s very, important to be part of things like that and it doesn’t have to be religious. The neighborhood is kind of like that too. If you move, that neighborhood is still functioning. They’re still going to have the WhatsApp group.

It’s like being part of something that functions successfully and well, whether you’re in it or not as individual, but it still helps you because you feel more fulfilled. You feel like you matter. It’s different than friendship, but it is so important.

Seth: I would say, uh, friendship is important. What I’m mostly talking about are not the small number of friends, but what we might call this middle ring. If you think about relationships as three rings. The inner ring is family and very close friends. The outer ring might be all the organizations that you have some relationship with but not very close.

Could be some non profits, some businesses. That middle ring is what’s decayed tremendously. , in my case, I’m thinking of hundreds of people I have some [00:24:00] relationship with that, my wife’s mother is sick. She left. I need help with my kids in the morning and the afternoon, or, my wife is pregnant.

I need my kids to stay someplace If you have a few friends, that might be fine, but actually there tends to be a lot more that your friends and your apps can not solve. We haven’t even talked about if I was financially challenged. I can think of something a little more dramatic.

It’s not common, but I have a neighbor who has a daughter a bit of a tragedy, she had two kids and herself and her husband were dead before they were 30. and the grandparents. which are not young, are raising the kids. They could never manage it practically or financially if there wasn’t a swarm of people around them helping them.

Think of the lost child, your friends would not have found that lost child, but your community would. And there’s lots of things like that. I’ll also add If you look at the data, proximity [00:25:00] to a relationship affects the emotional impact, of course, if something happened to your friend, you’re going to feel it, but in terms of someone who’s physically close to you versus someone who’s physically distant to you, the impact, for example, on your happiness, the translation of happiness, it happens is more consistently, or to a greater extent, when someone is physically close to you, even if you didn’t meet the person, but you heard they were happy, or you heard that something happened to them, the emotion, there’s so many aspects of this.

So I would certainly say don’t give up your friends. But do not underestimate this importance of these middle ring relationships and the single best place for them is where you live in the streets around your home and the institutions that are ideally place specific, neighborhood specific.

Nina: That’s so well said. We’re saying the same thing. I agree that I do think people underrate community and how important it is. You have to [00:26:00] participate in it, though. not everyone has to be a leader, but it also is nice to have people who are joiners

Seth: Showing up, showing up, showing, showing up. I mean, I’m on the board of one of these organizations. I’m a bit antisocial, to be honest. I don’t like going to just sit there and talk and talk and talk. some people love to just show up and my neighborhood is amazing I literally could have something I would go to because there’s a class or there’s an event.

there’s a lot going on and there’s stuff for my kids at their specific age. They only have to go a few blocks. We might drive, we might walk. This is the suburbs. it’s their classmates. It’s an event for their age, more or less. My daughter likes to go to something that’s every couple weeks for.

She’s in 7th. graders show up. It’s only like an hour plus. And it’s, it’s a joy for them. It’s a joy for myself to see her participate and she has a much richer social life. That if went to a school and had no neighbors or that the main medium of exchange Was the phone [00:27:00] and I think that’s what so many kids are lacking So I would just say that none of that is possible if you don’t have relationships. You don’t have those local Organizations.

Nina: I want to end with, just I’m curious, the feedback you’ve gotten from the book, I mean, it’s been out a while now, and I know you are a prolific writer elsewhere. It seems like, what could anyone possibly argue with? But I’m sure, because the internet is at the place it is, are people resistant to this idea at all?

Seth: Uh, no. Well, first of all, I’m a big I’m a I’m very big on LinkedIn And I’m definitely not on other types of social media. Maybe I might read it, but I don’t participate. so you don’t get a lot of negative feedback on LinkedIn, to be honest. And if anyone listening or watching wants to find me, go to LinkedIn and find me there.

I’m happy to connect with you and answer any questions. But I would say I get occasionally negative feedback. Not everyone likes the fact that I talk about religion. They think religion can only be bad. my book has, I mean, I’m religious. So it’s [00:28:00] a little bit in the book. It’s not a big part of the book, but when I talk about my background and how I came to community, I do talk about it.

and I don’t see religion as being the enemy of community. I I think it’s a good producer of community. It may not be for everybody. .

Nina: I lied about us being totally done. There’s one other thing I want you to explain. I

Seth: ask anything. Don’t

Nina: I know it, too, but my, not all my listeners will know it. I want you to explain in the religious Jewish community what a gemach is. It’s never come up in my show because there’s never been a reason to talk about it. I know what it is, but I want you to explain for my listeners and it is the most beautiful. I think it doesn’t have to be neighborhood based, but I think usually it is. how would you explain it in your words?

Seth: first of all, I would say comes in different forms, but I would say the form that I’m most familiar with it is In my neighborhood, we have like a toy g’mach, and then we might have children’s clothes g’mach, actually, I don’t know how many of them are. and it doesn’t have to be formal, But it does help. Our backup stroller is a used stroller. some of my [00:29:00] kids clothes come from neighbors. I don’t think that comes from the gamach, but I do know we like to go to the gamach when we can and look for toys or look for things that my kids can use. And so gamach basically is some sort of I would call it a loan, some sort of like loan club for a neighborhood or for a community in which people donate things and it lends them out with the understanding that you’re going to return them. So you can think of it as a library, for all the, all the stuff in your life.

Nina: It’s so I think it’s so cool. And I think it’s something you don’t have to be Jewish to do this. So for example, you might have somebody who always has six extra packNplays. Like that is their sort of job in the community. They just keep those. And so that if you have grandchildren visiting in the neighborhood and your kids live out of town, right? Is that a good example?

Seth: We haven’t done that particular things, but it’s more like we just look at what’s around and we take stuff, but that’s a great example. Let’s suppose you just need [00:30:00] one item for three days.  You go to the gamach, and you get it. I mean, you might ask your neighbors, but here’s an institution, maybe not formal, but an informal

Nina: It’s like an informal institution.

Seth: they’re there to help you solve short term problems like that.

Nina: it could be something like somebody in the neighborhood has extra little votive candles. They have hundreds of them, let’s say, and you’re having some sort of dinner at your house and you need just that one time every five years, you would love to have lots of little votive candles on your table. Maybe you don’t need to own those. Somebody in the neighborhood owns them and then lends them out. Isn’t that just like the

Seth: I I’m most familiar with it for kids. But I do know there’s older people, they might need clothes. They may not have resources. I think there’s, you could have chairs. I’ve heard of chairs. I’ve heard of tables. Stuff like that. You have a lot of guests coming or you’re doing something in your backyard. And so just think about all the things you have around your house. I mean, there’s not a house. There’s not a house. Come on, no one’s going to lend you a house. I don’t [00:31:00] think, but everything in your house, usually if you’re in a large enough community, it doesn’t have to be too large. You got them available someplace?

Nina: it’s a beautiful community concept that, that chairs is just a wonderful one. Every single person in the neighborhood doesn’t need to have 50 extra chairs if a couple people in the neighborhood would be willing to have a lot of chairs and they are The ones who will store it.

Seth: you may not know who those are, but you’ll know the so it’s like an intermediary that brings those things together. And all you gotta do is know there’s a list, somewhere of all the different gamachs. And then you just have to call them up and see what’s there for you.

Nina: I wanted people to hear about

Seth: love, I love all these, what I find in, um, I mean, you could say it’s, my Jewish world because we’re very communitarian, but I do think in any strong community, what you have is all these, what we might call micro institutions that are there to support people. They’re not doing for you, they’re doing with you.

And I, that’s what I think life was life until relatively recently. One of the things that’s [00:32:00] changed is nonprofits are doing to you and a transaction and here you’re doing with each other. So this, uh, gamach is a great idea, how we work with each other. We do with each other, we support each other it bolsters relationships, solves practical problems, you could argue, it’s a good representative of what community is.

Nina: and the possibilities

Seth: And the possibilities.

Nina: Seth, thank you so much. You and I both need to scurry off and do our, uh, both Jewish Shabbat, customs and everything. And I’ve got a whole meal to, to make still. So I am going to release us. I really appreciate you taking the time

Seth: Thank you so much, Nina. Have a good Sabbath or Shabbat Shalom. , I hope you make it in time. I don’t know how many, you do have an extra

Nina: Yes, you are the one. You’re going to be more in a rush than

Seth: Two and a half hours. I have two and a half hours.

Nina: Well, thank you. And, um, I hope we will connect again in the future.

Seth: Thank you so much and thank you everyone. Please take care.

Nina: Thank you all for being here with me [00:33:00] today. It was really cool for me to talk to Seth and, you know, it’s one of the best parts about having a podcast is reading things that interest me and then reaching out to the author and inviting them to come on and talk to me more about it, about the parts that I think my listeners would find interesting. So hopefully you took something away from this episode that might be able to help you in your own neighborhood or help you think about where you might want to live one day if you are ever moving. It’s It’s something to consider. How does your neighborhood function? like Seth and I discussed, it is different than friendship on the individual basis. We really were talking about something different today.

I invite you to join me next week. I’ll see you also, in between episodes on my sub stack at dearNina.substack.com. That’s where I usually say something a little extra about the episode. The way it works is I usually put the episode out and then it gives me some time to think about it after and then I write the newsletter.

So there’s usually something a little different in the newsletter. And also every month I have those anonymous letters that probably have questions that you have too about [00:34:00] your individual friendships. those are the ones that are for paying subscribers and you can upgrade anytime. And then you’ll have access to the full archive of past questions and answers. Come back next week when our friendships are going well, we are happier all around. Thanks. Bye.