rp daily: read. write. lead‪.‬ the nantucket project

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify Subscribe: episode updates read. write. lead. tom and rp spent this Juneteenth in discussion with alyesha wise, who is a spoken word poet, artist, and speaker from camden, new jersey. alyesha currently resides in los angeles where she is the co-founder of Spoken Literature Art Movement—an organization providing poetry education and extensive programming for poets, and is a teaching artist for Street Poets—a non-profit mostly serving juvenile injustice-involved youth.   to learn more about alyesha wise: https://www.alyeshawise.com/bio.html to check out alyesha's poetry: https://www.alyeshawise.com/poetry tom scott is chairman & co-founder of the nantucket project. rp eddy was the architect of the Clinton administration’s pandemic response framework and the United Nations response to the global AIDS epidemic & is CEO of global intelligence firm Ergo.   rp is co-author of the best-selling award-winning book Warnings: Finding Cassandras to Stop Catastrophes with Richard A. Clarke, Former National Security Council counterterrorism adviser. listen to this episode on apple podcasts subscribe to our youtube channel follow us on facebook follow us on instagram transcript   [00:00:16] So hi, everybody. It's Friday. It is June the 19th. It is.    [00:00:23] Quite popular at the moment, and I hope for the future known as Juneteenth, which is in a word or term, I don't think that many Americans would have used. Two weeks ago and now it seems to be on the lips of everybody, which is pretty cool. And I'm going to describe it in a minute. Welcome, Alisha and Arpey.    [00:00:48] Hi, guys. And Lisa, I'm going to give you a more formal introduction in a moment, but just by way of background. So Juneteenth. It's also known as Freedom Day or at Emancipation Day. It's from June 19th, 1865, when Texas freed the last slaves who are still being held. Two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation.    [00:01:07] So this was well after the time that legally they had been freed, but practically they had not. Lincoln was assassinated two months before this date. And so that's what it's meant to both remember. And then I you know, what I've been told by many people is also to celebrate. So it's a day of remembrance and a day of celebration.    [00:01:34] One of the things you guys have heard us talk about over the months and an Aleesha, this show was primarily started as a response to Kofod because of our PE's expertize in that specific field. But then more generally in government, in business and in other places, um, and it's evolved over time. But one of the things that Arpey has talked a lot about is that statistics don't tell very good stories, narratives do, and that people the imprints on their souls tend to come from.    [00:02:04] The narratives, you know, the narratives and you know my own sense of poetry, which is rare. You know, I don't like spend a lot of my days in poetry. I guess you could say that there's poetry and music and poetry and other things, and I spend more time in those places. But as I've gotten older, I've come to have this profound respect for poetry as like an emotional storytelling efficiency that's very powerful. And I think that you're someone who's particularly powerful in that realm. I want to mention one other thing, which is that Arpey and I are two white men who have our own perspectives. I think we hope to be open and hope to be. Part of solutions. But we also, I think, recognize our limitations and that.    [00:02:54] You know, I think you can help us individually to the extent you're open to that and others who are watching, so I just want to recognize that as we kind of dove in here. I'm so Alisha's a poet who I came to know through a friend of mine, Mick Ebeling, actually connected me with you. And then she spoke at the Nantucket Project, performed at the Nantucket Project, and has performed in a variety of ways with a sense.