Local community

And when you're old, you know, you, you can, you still have a view of something hopeful.

It's not just like all my friends are dying because I'm 70, right? It's like, well, you know, I have a, I have a friend who's, who's, 27, right? Like, and I even get this just from my local community theater, right? My wife and I do theater and, um, and just like the people who are closest to us that we're working in shows together, you get to see people in a variety of stages of life.

Like when you're, and that's, that's part of even being conservative, liberal, whatever, being, being within bubbles is, is, is kind of dependent upon people not having other perspectives, right? Is like, certain things look like a good idea until you see larger communities and go, oh, wait, this actually wouldn't work for a lot of people that I was in a show with last year.

Okay.

And so I would say that place for me was always, like I think I would like be in tears watching them like put this programming together and like helping these kids.

But that is always a project that kind of stuck with me because of the impact it had on the local community and the kids of that community.

They could do better for themselves and also just eat, right? I mean, just eat.

Basic human need.

At this point, I think collectively, the three of us have decided just with the state of Shatterpoint, how little we're playing Shatterpoint right now, I think is something we talked about actually kind of off camera, off recording.

Our current local community situation as well, that Shatterpoint is unfortunately moving away from being a game that Not that we're not interested in continuing to play it, just a lot of things have kind of fallen out from underneath us, given the announcement a little while ago and the changes that have been made.

And with that, it's just becoming a little bit difficult for us to come up with content, even with the move to the biweekly episodes, for us to continue the podcast.

So like Kyle alluded to, this will be...

and where this came from.

And, but honestly, it was the support from the Shatterpoint community that made this even possible.

Again, that first, that first inventory run, that first production run and being able to get the money back to be able to do the second and the third and the fourth was all due to support from our local community.

And I could not be more thankful for the reaction, the reception from everybody locally and events that we traveled out to.

Every council has to have a self-book register.

They report their figures to government and to MHCLG, the Ministry of Housing and Local Community.

Community Housing and Local Government.

It keeps changing.

I think one of the biggest things I'm realizing, like, um, as I'm still in-- like, I don't have littles anymore, but I'm still a mother to six kids, and so that still takes, you know, and my vocation is primary.

But so to really to judge by my kids, like, okay, w- who needs what and what is mine to give? Like, I think one of the biggest things I've learned in my schedule is, one, to leave margin for local community and to leave margin for my family, both.

You know, my family's first, but then also local community.

I'm feeling if I'm not showing up really well for the people in my life day in and day out, then I don't really want to be at a conference where I'm telling people how to build community, you know, like, or I'm telling people how to do this.

I, especially after COVID, I really value local community, local gatherings, local things a lot more than I did before.

And, um, I also think it just is a sign of an authentic witness, like how plugged in you are to your local vineyard, really, you know, to grow and be fruitful.

So yeah.

Um-

You might not be able to change what the president is going to say on a press conference.

You can change how your local community responds to a common problem.

And doing that work is really important for the strength of our democracy and our communities.

And then on why we pay attention to national elections and sometimes, in many instances, don't pay attention to more of the things that are happening locally.

It was really incredible and inspiring to hear you talk about impactful leadership in the legal field.

I wanted to ask a little bit about, you spoke about community and affecting change within your local communities.

For our ages and in an increasingly isolationist a society where social media sort of takes you away from building that local community and affecting change through empathy and like genuine interactions.

How is that something that we can foment in the future?

I don't guess it really matters in the grand scheme of things.

But I like all this, like, local community stuff you're starting to see pop up out of place.

Like the farmer's market, they've been hosting in Brandon every Saturday.

Me and Lacey have been going there every weekend.

Other than when we have not been in town, we've been going there every weekend, and that's where we've been buying our produce.

and it's just, I don't know, it's just like real local community stuff, people getting together where it does benefit communities and local businesses.

I just really have come to appreciate it, and this event is one of those.

All local businesses, free event.

Water is just pretty cheap and pretty plentiful in a lot of places, and they're not super incentivized to do that.

And it wasn't until recently that anyone had even considered that this would be a really giant deal for local communities, because in my opinion, this has kind of been warped by some strange media coverage.

I mean, I know this is going to be a slight tangent, but as you're talking about water, we talked a little bit about electricity, we'll talk in a minute maybe more about data centers and whether we'd want it in our neighborhoods.

The resistance to...