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Many corporations and industries nowadays focus more on earning a profit and less on supporting humanity, which is what truly matters. Money is now the major commodity and human life has become utterly disposable. For Jeffrey Charles Hardy, the only way to make real change today is to secure the so-called second human evolution in perpetuity. In this episode, he joins Corinna Bellizzi to delve into this concept, which he explores in his book To Care For Peace. Together, they discuss what it takes to reach our next level, ultimately achieving an understanding that there is more to life than physical or financial wealth. Jeffrey also shares how he contributes to revolutionizing the healthcare system, how to address society’s mindless consumption, the importance of the pre-planning process, and the practical ways to make utopia a reality.
About Jeffrey Charles Hardy
Jeffrey Charles Hardy is a 40-year veteran international healthcare system, service and facility planning and design consultant. Jeff is the President and Founder of Care for Peace, a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation based in California.
Hardy’s Global Experience: A completed case study: The Care for Peace Foundation’s successful Construction of a prototype tele-connected Care for Peace Community Development and Health Center in a ‘deep rural’ village in Myanmar (Burma). Despite the 2021 military coup, the Center is slated for replication in 250+ townships and villages throughout the country. “Change a village; Change the world.”
Hardy’s recently published book—TO CARE FOR PEACE – A GLOBAL MANDATE TO SECURE THE SECOND HUMAN EVOLUTION IN PERPETUITY (The Process is the Solution)—has been making as many waves on TV shows and podcasts as it has begun to resonate among the world community of people who want to be part of the process of changing the world for humanity and all living things.
Guest Website: https://careforpeace.org/
Guest Social:
https://www.facebook.com/Care4Peace
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kx6WmWXQN7I
Show Notes:
American Healthcare System - 03:05
Now About the state of our current Healthcare System in America.
To Care For Peace - 11:50
I'd like to talk about your work to care for. Peace.
Second Human Evolution - 18:08
You’ve spoken for a moment about this human evolution perspective how we've gone through our first evolution and we're essentially in this mid phase of preparing to go through a second evolution.
Coming Together - 24:36
There are people who say that they're you know, there's plenty of space and food for 10 billion 12 billion even 20 billion people on planet Earth and they're essentially trying to build a case for that.
Having Children - 30:59
What do you have to say to the Elon musks who want to have 12 kids and to kind of look down on people if they don't have a lot of children
Mindless Consumption - 34:49
I'm I also understand we the simple statistic if everyone in the world lived the way Americans, do we need five point one Earth? To thrive with our current population.
Solution Templates - 39:15
Because you do provide templates within the book. I think it would be helpful for people to understand a little bit of what they could expect from that if they're working on a particular solution that they want to Champion.
What’s Next - 43:52
If there's a closing thought that you'd like to leave our audience with I'd welcome it. But I also would just like to ask you what's next for Jeffrey.
Closing Words - 44:56
Thank you for joining me today Jeffrey. I really enjoyed this conversation.
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Securing The Second Human Evolution With Jeffrey Charles Hardy
This show is an invitation of sorts. Each week, I invite you to care more about a particular issue. We can learn together and build a path towards creating a better world. I'm coming off the heels of my personal experience at Natural Products Expo West, the industry I work within and call my home. It has me thinking about many different things, namely, one alarming trend that has continued over the last decade and doesn't seem to be slowing down.
There is a massive consolidation going on in this entrepreneurial climate. It's becoming increasingly hard for small businesses to grow and thrive. It's doing one thing well, which is consolidating wealth in the pockets of the few and creating less versatility, selection, and real uniqueness in the marketplace as a whole. That same alarming trend also exists in the world of healthcare.
Local independent family care practitioners used to be more the norm. You could find people who served their local community and were connected to it. Those are becoming something of the past. Larger conglomerates are moving in. In my local area, they've been swallowed up by PAMF, short for the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. I have to say that the name is deceptive. You hear the word foundation, and you assume, “This would be another do-gooder of sorts. They would put family and service first.” That hasn't proven to be the case. I have found the opposite to be true.
This is a trend across coast to coast of the United States and is becoming more global. It's part of globalization but also the consolidation of wealth, power, and money. I know this may be a stretch off-topic as I introduce the guest, but he's also intrinsically connected to the medical care system. I'd like to inquire about his perspective.
I'm going to introduce you to a pioneer and a veteran of that healthcare system who's dedicated his career to building a system that truly supports humanity across the globe. He has dedicated more than 50 years to this work. He's the President and Founder of Care For Peace, a 501(C)(3) foundation that has its home based in Northern California. Jeffrey began his career as a hospital corpsman in the United States Coast Guard and has been developing hospital services and facilities ever since.
Prior to selling his healthcare consultation company to a Fortune 500 firm in 1998, Jeffrey facilitated innovative and widely publicized management operations and new facility development services for over 120 hospitals across the US. He facilitated and managed international sister hospital relationships overseas. He joined me in talking about this experience and his book To Care for Peace: A Global Mandate to Secure the Second Human Evolution and Perpetuity. I'd like you to welcome Jeffrey along with me to the show. Thank you so much for joining me, Jeffrey Charles Hardy.
Thank you for joining me, Corinna Bellizzi.
I would start by hearing your perspective about the current state of the healthcare system in America. How has it changed over the years that you've been in this business, and why is it getting somewhat worse?
Before 1982, it was cost reimbursement. Hospitals were reimbursed for their costs. All of a sudden, this system came about. It was called DRG Diagnostic Related Groups. It was these payment chunks for whatever the disease was that a patient was in the hospital for, which meant that the coders who were sitting there trying to interpret what was going on in the hospital and putting it into a number were in charge of the number that got interpreted for patient payment. It was a mess. What happened was that corporate medicine came about at that point, and it's been a mess ever since.
A lot of things happened during that time. I was a protege of the gentleman who started Kaiser Foundation Hospitals and Clinics, one of the biggest health management organizations in the world. Dr. Sidney Garfield and Dr. Morris Collin came up with this health maintenance organization idea, which worked well when they focused on maintaining patients' health. They had multiphasic health systems connected to this. Every patient would go and have lots of tests, radiology, and laboratory. The multiphasic testing process identified this patient, and we could take care of this patient for the rest of his life. The only problem is that it costs a lot of money. They don't do that anymore.
One of the biggest problems we have is that it's not a health maintenance organization. It's the corporate health organization maintenance organization. You have to do a lot of your care searches in your care assessments by yourself, which was difficult at first, but I'm getting used to it. I like the fact that I can Google whatever it is that I have even before the doctor says, “Yeah, that's what you have.”
Doctor Google is replacing your care.
I'm right most of the time.
Isn't that sad?
Yes, it is.
I want to share a moment of my personal experience because the audience will relate. For years, I focused on making sure that my health insurance allowed a PPO because I wanted to choose a local care provider that enabled me to not have to go to an HMO first and get a referral. I wanted to target the family doctor and go to a different OB-GYN if I wanted to. If I had an issue with my foot, I could go to a podiatrist without having to get a referral to a referral.
I liked that because it meant I could work with specialists in their field, and I heard from my community that they were good at what they did. That changed when my local favorite office was swallowed by PAMF. The Palo Alto Medical Foundation came in and instituted its policies and changes. This culminated in an experience for me when my son had an ear infection. This is common when kids are little.
I take him to the office to have them look at his ear. This wasn't his first ear infection, but he was troubled by it. I had an auto scope at home because I was that mom trying to figure out what was going on with my kid. Is it inflamed enough to visit the doctor? He had some wax blocking his eardrum, making the infection worse. I would see a physician's assistant. I got in directly with a doctor. She picked up a metal tool, scooped it inside his ear, and put it down. She touched the implement for maybe five seconds.
This was considered an additional procedure in coding within PAMF. I had to pay $160 out of pocket in addition to my copay for coming into the office. I found out on the heels of this that my physician's assistant said, “I wouldn't have coded for it because I know that's what they do. We're getting pressure from the management company to do.” It told me that this is all about profit and not about service to the patient. It's an impersonalization of the entire experience. It creates profit centers that are completely without service to the patient.
My first question to them when I encountered this was, “How does this do no harm?” You're doing harm to me. You didn't ask me if this was something that I would approve if I knew it was going to cost me an extra $160 that I would not be able to have assessed in a health claim. This is also moving us in a direction of unaffordable healthcare. It's not the level of service. It's how these things are coded and how we serve the populace. I feel like it's broken.
Since I've gone to HMO, I'm at Kaiser now. They serve me better. I don't get these stunk weird costs coming out of nowhere, but I also have to get a referral for about anything. It's not as easy to manage my family's health in this system, but it certainly costs me less. I don't know what the answer is, but I speak for most Americans when I say I'm frustrated. This is not good.
I respect your situation. You did the right thing. I'm a Kaiser protégé. Because of that, I've been a Kaiser member for EoNS. I'm its worst critic. At one time, they listened to me because they knew who my bosses were, but as a Kaiser patient, I had to go to referrals. If I want dermatology, I have to go to a doctor and have the doctor take a photograph of the dermatology problem I have. They send the photograph to the dermatologist, who decides whether he is going to see me or not.
I've had that experience, too.
I'm used to that. It's okay. I'm saying, “Okay, that's fine.”
They're quick. It's not a completely broken system. It isn't me getting charged $160 for someone to touch and implement. From that perspective, it's better. I also feel like it's the same thing I opened this show with, which is that there's this incredible consolidation that is happening, which concentrates wealth and provides fewer options for people.
I don't know if that's what's right. I'm frustrated. There's not a solution in this comment. If we talk about it more, we can also initiate some changes. The templates in your book might help us get there. I'd like to talk about your work, To Care For Peace. I already started this show covering the reason I started it. It's an invitation to care more to create a better world. This is something you are working to do with this book. What does this work To Care For Peace mean to you?
We have a commonality that our names, Care For Peace and Care More Be Better, are synonymous if they work together. In my book, To Care For Peace: A Global Mandate to Secure the Second Human Evolution in Perpetuity, it is important to understand that care for peace is what you have to have to get into this discussion with the rest of the world if we are going to get from the first human evolution, which is dead, gone, and over, to a second human evolution, which we have not planned yet.
The whole world must get into the discussion of caring for peace as we go into a second human evolution, which is not planned yet.
I am a 50-year veteran healthcare system planner. I can't get the planning mode out of my brain. It's in there. When I go to another country, I follow the same formula as I did when I was in America, helping owners, architects, nurses, and doctors design $500 million hospitals. I start with a whole pre-planning process. The thing that is important to me is that we come to the discussion caring for peace.
What does that mean? Care is an active process that, when I was a hospital corpsman in the Coast Guard a long time ago when the Vietnam War was going on, and I was taking care of soldiers coming back from the Nikon Delta, I felt that wonderful feeling when I cared for someone. I called it peace. It wasn't happiness. It was peace.
To Care for Peace: A Global Mandate to Secure the Second Human Evolution in PerpetuityWhen I was later working in hospitals and clinics, I met all these nurses. They already know how to care for peace. It's amazing. This is not something that I felt. It's something that the nurses feel. They love their jobs. Most of them love their jobs. Even when they complain about the number of people that they have to take care of and some of the things that Corporate America has done to nurses to constrict their jobs, they still care. It's an amazing thing.
They got into nursing for a reason, and that's evident. I once interviewed a COVID nurse who's also a dear friend. She had volunteered to be one of the people serving those who had COVID because of her experience as a burn unit nurse. They're accustomed to being in head-to-toe gear to eliminate the possibility of spreading infection in individuals who are compromised with first-degree burns and sometimes covering 80 people or more of their bodies.
She's like, “I know this game.” This can be something that's claustrophobic for nurses if they've never experienced having to put on all the PPE. She talked about that whole experience as being relatively traumatizing. A lot of nurses were ejected from the field during that time because of how emotionally taxing it was. It was never because they didn't want to continue the work. It was that things got bad for so long without relief that they were compromised emotionally.
I don't know if you remember, but there was this whole movement in healthcare in which everything had to be patient-focused. I did conferences and seminars where I said, “No, I'm interested in nursing focus.” I'll tell you why. It’s because I'd go to a hospital. By the end of the shift, nurses were complaining about their knees because they were walking down these long corridors to take care of their patients. I said, “This is not the way to design a nursing unit.” No, it's not a patient care unit. It is a nursing unit because they're the ones who are in charge of everything. They are in charge of all the patients. The doctors who came in yelling at them or disturbing everything.
I designed, with the help of an architect and a nurse, a no-hidden patient nursing unit. It was a dining room table right in the middle of the unit and a patient room right around it. It had windows for every single room. They had curtains on the other side in case somebody was changing a dressing and they wanted privacy.
The bottom line was if you and I are sitting with a table in between us, and I look at you, and I say, “Corinna, the patient behind you is pulling out his trach tube,” that's a whole lot easier than seeing a bell ring and somebody pushing a nurse call button all the time. You had to get up from our discussion and run down the corridor to take care of whatever patient it was. You might remember which one it was because, by the time you get there, it might be, “It was this patient in this room.” I started a whole movement called the No Hidden Patient Movement. It was nursing care-focused because the nurses at the end of the day were wiped out.
I've been in hospitals that are arranged more like that with a spokes-off-the-wheel principle because, in that way, they can get to patients much more quickly from the so-called command center at the center. There are better outcomes, especially in critical care units. That all makes sense. It's logical. You've spoken for a moment about this human evolution perspective, how we've gone through our first evolution, and how we're in this mid-phase of preparing to go through a second evolution. Can you define what you mean by this? Where are we in that cycle? What will it take to get to this next phase?
The first human evolution I defined was the time when we heard and knew that mutually assured destruction was something that was a global issue. That was sometime between the mid-‘50s and the mid-‘60s because that was also the time when existentialism was coming from France, and the whole peace movement was starting.
We had Martin Luther King. Nixon was going to China and letting us know in America that China is not the name of what's underneath your plate. It's a country. There are a lot of things that happened in that period of time that established our relationship, awareness of the globe, and the fact that we had already conquered nature.
That's when it ended. We are now in what I call the suspended human evolution. It is suspended because we're flopping around like fish on the deck, or we're in one of those Indiana Jones movies where we're one of those bridges that go from one side to the next, and there's a chasm down below. If we fall, we're going to die.
That's what suspended human evolution is. It's this period of time when we had better get our act together before the bridge collapsed or before the fish died. I'm thinking about some of the things you're doing with Omega and with taking care of the source of fish and realizing that that is something that ended sometime around the mid-‘60s. We're eating the fish out of the ocean, and they're going to be gone if we don't do something about it.
What is the second human evolution? The second human evolution has to be planned. It is no longer the time of the first world. The first human evolution is over. We have to be God. We have to be humans who can learn from our mistakes, the past, our history, and each other and start talking and discussing what that second human evolution must be for us to stave off whatever this sixth extinction I hear about.
There was a podcaster who was asking me. He wanted to talk about the sixth extinction. I said, “I'm not there. I'm thinking about the next step for humanity.” What is the next step for humanity? My planning tools include an approach to what's called pre-planning. It's not even planning. It's the pre-planning process. When you ask, “Where are we now?” We are in that approach process. We haven't got the language yet to be able to go into pre-planning.
Pre-planning is where we talk, agree on stuff, and agree to disagree. Forget that we don't have time to agree to disagree. We have to say, “How do we deal with the population problem?” It's not a problem. Let's talk about the facts. You start talking about the facts. The most important thing we have to do when we're talking with each other is to back up to commonality.
That means backing up far enough that we can agree there's a migration problem from the heat belt all around the world that is going northward, and it's hitting our southern border here in the United States. It's crossing the Mediterranean and going to the European countries. You can look at Canada. It's even going north in Canada. They had a huge, gigantic fire in the Yukon. Whoever heard us, that's a thing?
The most important thing to do when talking with each other is to back up to commonality, far enough to where we can agree on the current problems that must be urgently solved.
You've said so much. I want to slow down for a second and unpack some of it. You're talking about a culture shift. What I mean by that is that when you talk about organizing human behavior in such a way that we agree on what the present state is, the challenge, and the how. That's a significant shift in the way we think and connect with one another. How do you see us moving the needle in that direction, or do you see it? We can get into some of the specifics, like you mentioned, such as being overpopulated or having a population problem, as well as the migratory issues that are playing. We get into more specifics from there.
The most important thing we're doing is talking about it. I look at this whole podcast revolution. What you are doing is the most important thing that we can be doing now. You are not talking with me. You're talking with other people. I've seen the list of podcasts that you have done with other people. I'm thinking, “This is great because you are spreading the word.”
The word is the spiritual word. It's the word that will bring us all together through our shared definitions of what it is that we believe in. Those are things that we need to talk about. I believe in human immortality. What does that translate into a discussion about the population problem? I don't talk about population control. I talk about population continuity because that's what we want on a global scale.
There are people who say that there's plenty of space and food for 10 billion, 12 billion, or even 20 billion people on planet Earth. They're trying to build a case for that. I have felt for some time personally like we are overpopulated if you consider the concentration of people in a given area, which also forces us to become more insular because it's harder to find tribes of common people when you have many thrust into an area from different backgrounds, jobs, and everything. We find community on social media, but they might be in Chicago, and we're in San Francisco.
We are not getting the same type of in-person community as easily as we once might have. In particular, if we don't do something like go away to college and develop those types of relationships. More people are now shifting to trade schools because they're seeing a little bit less hope from the massive college debt that they might accrue. We have a lot of small culture shifts that are happening within our society that don't lean in yet to the possibility of coming together and the way that you're purporting.
One of the things I work hard to do with this show is to try. While I do cover a lot of social impact and sustainability stories, which tend to trend more on the left side of the aisle, I'm also welcoming to people who have opposing views, talking about freedom of speech and feeling that they're more limited by the democratic movement and what they call a more socialist agenda. How do we get these two opposing sides to come together now with the rapidity that we need them to push for change that can result in that futurist possibility of the development of a utopia where we can all thrive?
We can only do what we are able to do. Judge said, “You can only do what you do best.” That's what you need to do. When I think about my role, I look at the project that we did in Myanmar. It was to build a prototype, not a health center, but a community development and health center. It was a prototype because the plan was to build 250 more clinics in other areas.
This is Burma. It is as wild and primitive as anywhere in Africa. We went there and started a whole process, but it was working, and we shared our tools with the people. It was talking about population continuity and getting discussions going in that regard. It was interesting because all the birth spacing discussions and the discussions on teaching girls came up. What we can do is what we do. What I do is help the whole process of community and healthcare development at that clinic. It was wonderful. That's all I can do. We can talk.
When it comes to people who say, “When I fly over the country, I look down and see all these places that don't have people in them. Why don't we have any problems?” I say, “All you have to do is go to your grocery store and come back and complain to me about the cost of food and gas because you're being affected by the supply and demand problem that occurs when there are many people.”
This is the problem that we have confronted in the United States for the last several years, where a considerable part of the population is in those flyover territories. This felt left behind. You see more media now covering what life is like in Appalachia. You have rising drug epidemics in these arenas, which were largely created by pharmaceutical companies and doctors overprescribing medications that were irresponsible in the first place.
We've created most of the problems that exist here through profit-driven extractive principles. I'm connecting these two ideas because you also speak about something important for us to consider, not how many children we all have or don't have but also how we consume, what we consume, and the choices we make.
Much of our consumption here in the United States, in particular, is mindless consumption. We eat when we're watching TV. A bag of chips that's supposed to have six servings in it is gone before we stand up again. This impacts our waistline and our health outcomes dramatically. The fact that we go to the grocery store, we're hit with a barrage of snack foods, even more than the produce and the other more healthy foods that we might consume.
This idea we are also pushed that somehow our population in the United States will decline unless we start getting to it and having more babies. Women are tending to have children later, myself included. I had my first child at 38 and my second at 41. My husband and I are two and done. He's fixed. It's not happening anymore. I'm still menstruating. I could get pregnant tomorrow because my family is full of fertile people, but it wouldn't be the responsible thing for me to do. This is something that I take seriously.
I'm 47. I want to be around and be an old lady when my kids are at this stage of their lives. That gets harder to do if you have children when you're 45, 50, and 60, even if it's possible. What do you have to say to Elon Musk, who wants to have twelve kids and to look down on people if they don't have a lot of children? What more do you say to those who want to consume mindlessly?
I have two sons like you. I got fixed. That's part of our immortality. We procreate and replicate ourselves. Each of us replicates ourselves. That's our donation to the immortality pool. That's where a lot of people are. I've worked in Nigeria, and I've looked at the number of children, and some of the women have the highest number of births per woman of anywhere else in the world. Eleven is average. I say, “If that's average, does that mean someone has twenty, and somebody else has only ten?” It's weird.
I don't want to villainize people for having more children. My older sister has six children. That's a lot of kids. She started when she was in her twenties. Having had my first child at 38, I feared that I wouldn't connect. I would be one of those mothers that didn't love their kids. I've met a women who didn't ever connect with her child. I had this fear in the back of my mind that it would be like that for me.
He came into this world, and I was like, “I get why my sister had six of these beautiful babies.” I'm instantly in love in a way that I never experienced before. At that moment, I can't knock somebody for having that experience and for wanting to have a big family. When they come from a large family, it feels like it's tradition, love, and community all in one.
In Mali, if you have eleven kids, eight will live. Those eight will get old enough that when you're in your old age, they'll take care of you. We don't have that problem here.
Is it a wealth problem? Do you think that's the impetus or somehow inbred into us from a survival perspective?
The latter. It's a survival thing, and I highly respect it. We know a woman who has had ten children. Our first inclination, because we met her when she had eight and she was pregnant, I'm going, “How can we even talk with this woman? It's immoral.” The more we thought about it, the more we realized, “You can't put a morality stamp on it. We've got to figure out how to deal with it.” China started with that one-child thing, and that didn't work because it gradually became obvious that one child of two people wouldn't be able to take care of two people when the kid got older, and the older people got older.
People were preferentially wanting to have boys. They would do things like have an ultrasound, and it's a girl. Maybe we'll abort this one. You read Pearl S. Buck's work, Imperial Woman, and another one that’s something to that effect. Baby murders because they didn't have the preferred son, and they wanted the name to live on. That's the dark underbelly of that regimen. We need something that is inclusive.
I understand the simple statistics. If everyone in the world lived the way Americans do, we'd need 5.1 Earths to thrive with our current population. We don't have 5.1 Earths. Going to Mars won't solve this for us. If that's the case, we need to think about consumption. We need to think about how we're consuming, what we're consuming, and why. I don't think we're in the habit of asking ourselves why. Your work has me thinking about all of this. I have to say that I'm an optimist, but I'm also a realist. I'm struggling with this entire concept of buy-in and getting broad enough buy-in that we can remain hopeful and optimistic.
You are leading the discussion. I don't look at Trump, Biden, or any of our politicians to be leading this discussion.
They're in damage control. That's what I think their job is at this point. They aren't able to lead because they have many fires to put out all the time. We have to think this through that futurist world and the world that we want to build. What does it look like? What is the world you want to build? What do you think it could be? Perhaps this is the note we need to land on.
This is the reason why I'm trying to put a name on where we've been as humanity and the first human evolution where we are now, the suspended and this second human evolution. Come on, let's start talking about the second human evolution. We're in charge of nature. Therefore, what are we going to do, and how are we going to get there? These issues include the population control problem and supply and demand. What you're doing in looking at the whole fish industry is falling apart, dying, and disappearing.
What are we going to do with that? I don't have all the answers, but I do have the tools. That's where the whole approach, the pre-planning process, is important. In my book, I talk about pre-planning a lot. I will give some simple tools and explain how to discuss these things. If we're going to discuss it, how do we discuss abortion? We have to assign for every issue some from and to. There's a whole process of from-to.
What is the from-to? The from is having all the babies, or the to is having an abortion. That's not it. You get the discussion going. The people who are against abortion and for abortion are backing up. What I am talking with people who are saying, “We're going to build a brand new hospital there. We're going to make it big. It's tall.” I'm saying, “Where's the information? Where are the statistics? What are you going to do in that hospital?”
They don't start with this whole process of pre-planning, which is what the heck do we need? Do we need a hospital? We have hospitals over there. Why do we need another one? Our corporation has decided that if we don't build a hospital right there, the other two hospitals are gonna take our patients away from it. The bottom line is that we have to start using the tools from to, which is an important tool in the backup process. What are we talking about?
Are we going from where are we going to? What's the objective? It sounds simple, but you have to define that. This reminds me of my earlier interview with Paul Hawken, where we were talking about regeneration. He was amidst this climate argument with all these climate scientists and saying, “We have to define the problem. What's the problem? We need to reverse global warming. That's the problem that we need to define.” Nobody was saying it.
It's giving voice to that issue. You aren't defining the problem. You can't define a solution. It's important that we get there. I am curious because you provide templates within the book. It would be helpful for people to understand what they could expect from that. If they're working on a particular solution they want to champion, how would your work help them get there?
The templates are simple templates. I'm a simple guy. I'm not a big academic person here. I'm doing things that will help the people that I work with in the villages. I don't care if they never even went to school. I'm trying to help. That's what the templates are. I've got a personal template that says, “My personal value is I want to care for peace. The way I want to do it is by helping people in the world. My attitude is to do everything I can to care for peace.”
What's the result for me? It's peace for me. It's that feeling on a relational level. This is the template. On a relational level, I want to help other people in their process of caring for people. What's the environmental? There's an environmental section. It's a single page for the personal template. The environmental is I better do good to the Earth. I need to be a good steward. These are my core beliefs, feelings, and thoughts about what we need to do individually to come to the table and talk with other people about this. If they also agree, “I want to care for peace. I want to care for your peace. I want to take care of the peace that we have brought to this moment. Let's agree with that.
That's what the templates are. The templates are tools to discuss what we have to discuss and the difficult issues of the day. How are we going to start? How are we going to get there? That's where, at the bottom, the most important quote I have. I always tell people they don't have to read the book. They need the front cover. The front cover says, “The process is the solution.” That's part of the sentence because the process is the solution. The problem is that we don't have the tools to know where the heck we're going. It's not two roads diverged in a yellow wood. There are thousands of roads that we need to think about.
How are we going to go down those roads? There's a process. When we stand there, what are we going to do? We're going to talk to the people who are coming down those roads toward us and find out what they know before we even take our first step. Pre-planning is important. It requires us to sit, stand, and talk. That's it. That's what you're doing. You and I have been talking this whole time. I'm sitting. You're sitting. This is what we do in the first stages of pre-planning. Thank you so much for leading this process. I am invigorated by all the podcasts out there. There are tons of podcasts, like how you can wash your clothes.
There are some fun conversations between five guys in a bar. There are all sorts of podcasts out there, but there are a fair number that are seeking to build a better world and invite people to think more about the ideas they're confronting. That is what I would beg people to do from this conversation. Think more. I am coming away with a theme. One of those themes is that process is important. We need to have a system, but we must understand that going to the common higher end of thinking and thinking more about the solutions and the common ground that we may be on already. The path that we can share.
We will get through conflict together. We will be able to deepen the thinking of solutions. We will be able to put forth greater efforts that are more inclusive and that don't seek to divide. That's what I'm getting from this overall conversation. If there's a closing thought that you'd like to leave our audience with, I'd welcome it. I also would like to ask you. What's next for Jeffrey?
I have one closing thought, and it's the first sentence in the preface of my book. To care for peace may not be the secret of life, but it is as close to the secret of living as there is.
Second Human Evolution: To Care For Peace may not be the secret of life, but it is as close to the secret of living there is.
I have to say from the podcast I've heard you on and also through this conversation that my synonym for peace is love. I care about love. I feel like there are certain unalienable truths. That is, we all want love in our lives. If we can care for peace and love, we can make a better world that we all want to thrive within. Perhaps that can help resolve some of our inner conflicts. Thank you so much for joining me, Jeffrey. I've enjoyed this conversation.
Thank you so much. I enjoyed it. There are a billion shows out there, but you are one of a small group of people who are doing what you're doing. I know that because I've been trying to reach out to them.
You can help me connect with more of them because I always want to meet other podcasters who are out there to make the world a better place, and sometimes have crossed-guested or even shared their podcast on my show stream to bring more people to their show and vice versa. There's some back-scratching that goes on in this community of do-gooders. It's important that we focus on that because we're living in an attention economy of sorts, but we're all in this together. It's a crazy race for space.
I'll send you my list. It's 427 pages long. I'm going to send it to you because every podcast I have connected with yours is one of them. I'll send it to you, and you can tick them off.
I'll guest on their show and connect with them. If they're local to me, I’ll arrange a little pod meet-up in person. That would be incredible.
Let's meet on the pier in Santa Cruz. That restaurant out there is perfect.
Anytime you're here, reach out. Thank you so much for joining me, Jeffrey.
Thank you.
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To find out more about Jeffrey Charles Hardy and his important work, including his book To Care for Peace: A Global Mandate to Secure The Second Human Evolution in Perpetuity, visit the links in my show notes. I'm also including them in my Amazon shop, which will be linked with show notes at Amazon.com/Shop/CorinnaBellizzi. You can find these resources, links, and so much more on my website. Visit the site and join us on this journey to build a better future.
When you sign up for my newsletter, you'll even receive a five-step guide to help unleash your inner activist. If you have a particular cause that you're working to champion, this can provide you with some groundwork. It also includes links to several climate charities I encourage you to support. Thank you, readers, now and always for being a part of this show and this community because together we can do so much more. We can care more. We can be better. We can even secure the second human evolution of humanity and create that better futurist world we want to live within. Thank you.