This is a transcript of Human Up Podcast Season 2, Episode 11with Dr. Martin Burt which you can watch and listen to here:
Dave Marlon: Welcome to the Human Up Podcast. I'm your host, Dave Marlon, and I'm honored to have Dr. Martin Burt with us today. Good morning.
Dr. Martin Burt: Good afternoon. I'm returning the call from Paraguay, in the middle of South America. We're a small country about the size of California or Spain. We're an island country surrounded by land—Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia. But we're very provincial, in the middle of South America. We call ourselves the heart of South America, and we are a very happy-go-lucky country.
Dave: That's lovely. I know of the famous falls that are there, which are on my bucket list.
Dr. Martin: Yes, yes, the Iguazu Waterfalls are one of the most beautiful, enormous falls. They go on forever. And I was reminded today that it was discovered by a Spanish explorer who, in his previous life, had discovered the mouth of the Mississippi River, crossed into Mexico, and founded El Paso, Texas. He wrote a book about his boat sinking and him walking throughout the Gulf of Mexico, and then wrote a book in Spain, became famous, and the King of Spain sent him to be governor of Paraguay. He walked from the Atlantic Ocean two thousand miles, bringing horses and people—yeah, way back in 1542 or something like that. So there is a connection. There is a connection, always.
Dave: That's amazing. That's quite a trek. I know even today that's considered a very difficult journey, even in the days of cars, and I can't imagine a two thousand mile walk back then.
Dr. Martin: Well, yeah. Imagine driving from Tampa to Galveston, Texas, then into Mexico, and ending up in the Pacific. So, life is beautiful. There are so many interesting people who have been here before us, and hopefully we can make our little contribution to this beautiful world as well
Dave: Well, you're certainly doing so. And to me, for our viewers, the fact that you were an advisor to the president, you were a mayor there in Paraguay, you were the deputy minister of commerce... So like me, I see you studied economics a little bit.
Dr. Martin: I studied public administration. I went to the United States in 1976 to go to college. I went to a beautiful Northern California university, University of the Pacific, and it was a very beautiful thing. I studied public administration there, but what's more important, I fell in love with an American girl in my last semester in college. My mother said, Do not marry an American girl. No, no, no, no, no. And her father said, Don't get involved with Mexicans. But I'm not Mexican! In any case, we've been together forty-five years, we have a beautiful family, and life is beautiful.
Dave: Now you also have a residence in Irvine, I saw.
Dr. Martin: Yes, I was a visiting professor there in Southern California. So I go to the States for one or two months every year to teach courses on social entrepreneurship and try to convince engineering students and economics students that there's a whole array of opportunities there—problems like a lack of eyeglasses, lack of toilets, and lack of drinking water that are actually opportunities for people to come up with social enterprises that can actually not only fill your soul, but fill your fridge. I mean, you can actually build a business solving a problem. That is very rewarding and appealing to many young students who want to make a difference in this world. So I'm part of that movement and it's very satisfying. I work at an international level right now, including in the US, where I work in fourteen states with our programs. So I'm very much involved in South-South cooperation, but also South-North cooperation, which is... you know, the world is a wheel anyway, so that's just the way it is.
Dave: That's beautiful, and I'm a victim of that type of education. You know, I got my MBA over thirty years ago and I was the CEO of a publicly traded New York Stock Exchange corporation, and I was trained to maximize my assets and profits.
Dr. Martin: Right, right.
Dave: I went back later in life and got a doctorate degree. Addressing social change sort of pivoted my whole frame of reference. So about a dozen years ago, I opened up a nonprofit, and my day job is in the worst part of Las Vegas, helping as many humans as I can address serious mental health disorders and substance use disorders. Although we're small, I have a staff of 130, and we help save fifteen of God's kids each day who walk through our door. It's funny that I used to make a lot of money, but now I'm rich.
Dr. Martin: Exactly! Exactly. Yeah. And if you and I were more intelligent, we would do both—we would be wealthy and rich. But no, the truth is that for a business to be system-changing and structurally changing, we need to be able to multiply your work and have one per city around the world. There are only six thousand cities in the United States. The key is to find a way that we can cookie-cutter it, replicate it, make it scale, and make it sustainable. That is a beautiful challenge, but there has to be a model, right? I was always thinking: how can we monetize your effort and show the government how much money you save them by these young, god's kids not going to the emergency room every day?
Dave: Uh-huh.
Dr. Martin: That you can monetize, and maybe with AI now, we can be more intelligent. In any case, it's cheaper for society in general and for the government in particular to have organizations like yours than to just have what we have right now, which is chaos and disaster.
Dave: Agreed a hundred percent. Also, for our viewers, I hate to diminish your tool to just the Poverty Stoplight, but could you give me two minutes on what this miraculous tool is? I look at it as a case management template to help. Could you explain it to our viewers?
Dr. Martin: Yeah. Well, it has two names. In the world, it's called Poverty Stoplight. In the United States, it's called Thrive Lights, and the tool itself is called Aspire. That's the beginning of the beauty of it—it's adaptable to every society where we work. In the Philippines, it has a different name; in Tunisia, Northern Africa, another, because every society has its own culture. In any case, what we have found is that traditional welfare programs are well-intended maybe, but insufficient. So, what we started doing is asking people around the world, What does it mean for you to be not poor? or What does it mean for you to thrive? And people know. If you work with the Roma or the Gypsies in Eastern Europe, they know what it means to be non-poor. The Indigenous peoples in the Amazon know exactly. Or the people living in the townships in the slums of Johannesburg, South Africa. People know exactly what it is to be not poor—how much money, how much food, how much housing, etc.
Dr. Martin: Since many of the issues dealing with doing well have to do with subjective indicators like motivation, self-esteem, the capacity to control one's emotions, having a plan, and thinking of others, as well as objective ones like having enough money, family savings, drinking water, and public transportation, how does one gauge the subjective well-being of people with a typical, extractive survey? We turned it around and said, Why don't we have people measure themselves? We were surprised the first time, because people are often considered damaged, wounded merchandise, and others wonder, How could this young single mother know what's wrong with her? But basically, if you can see my screen here, this is the one we use in South America. For each indicator, we have a red, yellow, or green condition. For example, We have enough income. It takes a family a second to say whether they are red, yellow, or green in income. Then they go to We have a family budget, and they know exactly where they are. Then they say, We have good drinking water. In twenty minutes or less, even if the family is illiterate, they can self-analyze.
Dave: Know me.
Dr. Martin: Because then they can become aware. Instead of doing a government poverty index that aggregates data for decision-makers at the top, we create a dashboard where the family can indicate across fifty indicators whether they are red (very poor), yellow, or green. Remember that novel by Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina? The first line is, All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. That's just like everybody, right? That's the best novel in the world! So basically, every poor family is poor in their own way. Some are poor because they don't have money, some because they don't have motivation, some because they don't have good public transport. In your line of work, you know that everybody comes with their own wounds, right? But we all have blessings, too.
Dr. Martin: So this Poverty Stoplight or Thrive Lights dashboard allows people to count their blessings. Remember that saying? If you don't count your blessings, they don't count. Nobody asks a wounded, poor person, Tell me the ten good things that are going well for you. That is the beginning of saying, Look at the beautiful things. Okay, you don't have a washer, but you have glasses. It could be worse if you didn't have eyeglasses. And look, you have an uncle; it could be worse if you didn't. People have to count their blessings. Then they have to say where they want to start. Some people want to start learning how to save, some want to learn how to budget, some want to get glasses, some need to fix their bathroom, and some need to have time to spend with their relatives. For some people, time is more important than money. For every community where we work around the world, we show them solutions based on how other families just like them have addressed their issues. It's very beautiful work. We are now working with 633,000 families in 60 countries.
Dave: That's amazing.
Dr. Martin: The beautiful thing that we found is that the unit of analysis is not the individual, but the family household. You cannot get a person out of poverty alone. There is no such thing as child poverty in isolation—it's the child, the mother, the ailing grandmother, and the single mother cousin living in the house. Those who sleep under the same roof and eat from the same pot constitute a family unit. That's the most important thing—it's the family unit. In my country, a third of the families are led by a single woman, so we know all that. The good news is that a Chicago family is identical to a Moroccan family, an Indian family, or a Filipino family. The mothers are all cut from the same cloth—they are determined to get their children ahead, and the success stories around the world are amazing.
Dr. Martin: Now with technology, Dave, we can reconfigure the world. It's no longer just the United Nations or governments. How about the mothers? How about if we organize the units and give power to the families to: A) identify what it means for them to thrive, and B) identify their own determination? We are seeing a boom of trapped energy being released. Mothers in the slums of São Paulo in Brazil say, Why didn't you come here before, dummy? No one ever listened to them before because government offices packaged welfare programs and threw money at them. The assumed problem with the poor is that they don't have money, so people say, Why don't you just give a universal basic income? Throw money at them. And if it doesn't work, who gets the blame? The inventor of the solution or the family? The family. So I don't agree with handouts and welfare programs that have not been created by the interested party.
Dave: I share your perspective. Working on homelessness in Las Vegas, most people I talk to say, Dave, the problem is obviously a home. We just need to give them a home. I explain to them that there are 9,000 unhoused people in Las Vegas. Most of them know me personally because I've been doing this for quite some time, and less than one or two percent are unhoused because rent went from $900 to $1,000. They are unhoused due to a serious mental health disorder or a substance use disorder. It's not a housing problem per se; it's a behavioral health problem.
Dr. Martin: Exactly. My country is a poor country, but we don't have homeless people. We don't have people sleeping in the streets—never, never, never.
Dave: Is that due to a more effective family unit?
Dr. Martin: So we go to the States and ask, Where are these people's families? Maybe they were expelled from their families because of behavioral issues or other problems. But I think we have to help these people reconfigure artificial families—new families—so that they can be human, have support, and learn how to deal with others. It's difficult, but every country is unique. Our country, although poor, is among the happiest countries in the world, and we don't have homelessness. We do have a lot of poor families, but it's really interesting. We would all learn just from listening to other people's experiences instead of coming up with a simplistic, superficial, and arrogant response like I know and you don't know. Congratulations on what you do! When I visit, I would love to get to know more, because I think maybe we can work together. Take a look at our website, thrivelights.org. In fact, right now we have a book coming out called The Mirror and the Map. It covers our work in fourteen US states, featuring stories from San Antonio, Texas, North Carolina, Kansas, Chicago, and Southern California. It's very beautiful, and I'm very proud to be launching it.
Dave: Right on. Well, I love your perspective. Like I say, the solution to homelessness in my city is not just homes, and as you say, the solution to poverty is not just giving people money.
Dr. Martin: No, exactly. It's not a lack of money. In fact, my team laughs when I tell them, The poor are not poor; the poor have money. Money is not the problem. The problem is not having enough information, motivation, good examples, a map, or a mirror. How else do you explain low-income people having a beautiful TV and a more expensive iPhone than you and I could afford if we pooled our savings? That means when there is a will, there is a way! That is beautiful news. That means they can also have a proper kitchen and a proper toilet if they can answer two questions that have to do with agency: Is it worth it? and Can I do it?
Dr. Martin: Is it worth it? has to do with motivation—doing things that aren't fun. Can I do it? has to do with skills and training. But as Joseph Grenny writes in his book Influencer, personal motivation and skills alone are not enough. One person cannot do it alone—we need peer groups, group support, and peer pressure. For example, my wife says, Okay, it's 5:30 in the morning; we're going to exercise from 6:00 to 7:00. I would never get up on my own to do a plank at six in the morning! As Americans say, that's cruel and unusual punishment. But my American wife forces me to exercise early in the morning, and thanks to her, I am healthier than I would be alone. Peer support is key, but you also need incentives built into the system. The good news is that you can go from having no family savings to having savings, from no budget to having a budget, and from no glasses to having glasses. These things are possible. The key is to disaggregate the problem into very small, granular, actionable, and achievable steps
Dave: Yeah, into your fifty traffic lights.
Dr. Martin: Yeah. In my country, for example, when I ask people what it means to have proper housing, they say, You have to have a safe roof, windows, and doors; separate bedrooms for adults and children; an elevated stove and ventilated kitchen; a proper bathroom; a refrigerator; furniture; and utensils. That's it in my country. If you have those seven things, you're not poor—you're lower-middle class. That's different from everybody sleeping in the same bed, including the foster father and a twelve-year-old teenager. In fact, revolutions are made by the middle class, not by the poor. The poor are just trying to get enough to eat. You can be non-poor in terms of a bathroom, but poor in terms of a refrigerator. There is no need to summarize it into a single number. Your car dashboard shows fuel, tire pressure, oil, and speed without needing a single overall score of 73 or 47. You just need a dashboard. That is why the book is called The Mirror and the Map.
Dr. Martin: People have to look at themselves in a mirror, like this dashboard. As you said, yes, it's a tool for the caseworker, but the caseworker is the secondary user. The primary user is the family itself.
Dave: It's the family. Yeah, I love that. Let me just mention that the primary thing we do here at Vegas Stronger is group therapy. The story I always like to tell people is that when I was in my addiction, my wife would drag me to Harvard-trained psychiatrists. They would say, Dave, what's the problem? And I would explain, My problem is my wife nags me, my boss doesn't appreciate me, and sometimes the cops pick on me. So the provider would try to come up with interventions to address the patient's presenting problem. Now, if I say that same thing in a group of my peers, they will openly laugh at me. It's a much more effective innovation to break down denial than a one-on-one session. So I love your discussion about a group being able to help.
Dr. Martin: Yeah. We are two things at the same time: an individual person and a member of a family or community. They are indistinguishable. There's a great philosopher living in Denver, Colorado, named Ken Wilber. He developed Integral Theory, where he disaggregates reality in a very clear way. He says to understand reality, we have to look at four quadrants simultaneously: individual behavior, the system we work in, our shared values and culture, and our individual intentions. That explains something like nutrition. Is bad nutrition due to personal behavior, living in a food desert, a culture where being overweight isn't seen as a problem, or underlying health issues? You can live across the street from a farmer's market and still have a disastrous diet. You can live across the street from a bank and never open a savings account. Men can live across the street from a clinic and never get a colonoscopy, or women may skip their annual checkups, making excuses about not having time. We all have our issues.
Dr. Martin: This is an important point about the Thrive Lights and Poverty Stoplight methodology: it's not us, the non-poor versus them, the poor. You and I can have two or three issues that are more serious than those of a homeless person you're working with. If you see the problem as solely a lack of income and raise the salary of all Walmart employees for fairness, they may or may not improve their quality of life—they might just buy an expensive pickup truck and bury themselves in more debt.
Dave: Right, yep. I love that, and one of the questions I was going to ask you is: whose responsibility is this? Is it the government's responsibility—state, federal, or municipal? Is it your workplace? In the United States, we've had a healthcare system where the burden falls on employers. So employers have been the primary providers of healthcare. Whose job is it to help us out of poverty? I love the fact that you see it clearly: it's the families.
Dr. Martin: Every family's, in the good sense of the word. Look at the other extreme: when poverty and injustice are viewed strictly as a social justice problem for the government to solve, the government says, Let me take care of it. The minute they claim it as a public good, they amputate the hand of the family and say, Stay there, I will solve your problem. That is happening all over the world. But now we have technology to put AI into the hands of that single mother to coach her, motivate her, introduce her to peers, show her success stories, hold her tight, and love her. Today we walk with her, but tomorrow we may be the ones who need help. We're all in this together, and each of us has our own journey. That's human life.
Dave: I want to cheer and applaud your technology, your solution, and, more importantly, your perspective. A small mind will always defer to government intervention to fix the problem.
Dr. Martin: Yeah. And the government will come up with a simplistic solution that won't work, and of course, they won't take the blame. They'll say, Well, these people are dumb anyway. Let's just give them a second-class project because they're second-class citizens. What they're saying is, You're damaged merchandise; you can never get out. So let me give you a couple of bucks, but let me work on your children so they won't be poor. No, no, no! Everybody has an opportunity for salvation up to five minutes before death, as the poem says. We have to trust that people are not damaged merchandise, and that with proper motivation and training, any family in the world can earn an income above the poverty line, learn to budget, and build savings.
Dave: Did you learn this frame of reference in American universities, or did living under a Paraguayan dictatorship help frame your thinking? Please tell me.
Dr. Martin: Well, I've lived half my life under a military dictatorship and half my life trying to build a new democracy. When I finished graduate school and returned to Paraguay with my new American wife to start a family, I couldn't get work because my family was blacklisted by the dictatorship. So I started the country's first NGO to work with street vendors. We learned through microfinance and supporting micro-enterprises that providing financial services to the poor is important, but not enough. We also learned that income alone doesn't automatically translate into well-being. Trickle-down economics works, but not perfectly. So people said, Let's invest in the bottom of the pyramid. But we discovered that helping someone run a taco truck doesn't automatically translate into proper dental care, savings, or housing.
Dr. Martin: It needs one more twist: helping the taco truck owner understand her whole situation through self-reflection. We use easy tools with colors and images—she doesn't need to read or write—to reflect on her strengths and weaknesses. She can ask herself why everyone is sleeping in the same bed or why they aren't eating proper food. The good news is that she can answer those questions and set her own priorities. We must start with her priorities, not yours. If her priority is to be a grandmother and have time for her grandchildren, let's work on that priority instead of focusing solely on what her taco truck should look like.
Dave: I a hundred percent agree. I was the child of immigrants in the United States. I remember my grandmother, grandfather, myself, and my three sisters all slept in the same room for the first several years of my childhood. It was the most normal thing in the world to me—we weren't poor, and I was as happy as a kid could be. Looking back at that now from my six-thousand-square-foot house, it seems crazy. So it seems like this Poverty Stoplight tool also helps a family see the forest for the trees.
Dr. Martin: Exactly. You start seeing things as a family unit and thinking of others when making decisions. We are working in Canada, the US, Mexico, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Colombia, and beyond, and the dynamics are identical to those in Tunisia, Morocco, South Africa, or Nigeria. What is the difference between a Nigerian family and a Chicago family? Absolutely none. The mother of the house is wired to think of the family unit. In any case, it's beautiful work, and I'm happy to give back to the United States. As I mentioned, we are exploring ways to put AI directly into the hands of poor families to empower them, restore their vision and enthusiasm, and help them escape the epidemic of isolation and loneliness. Life is beautiful, and it's not all about work—there has to be love, too.
Dave: I love your perspective on leveraging AI to be more effective. I use AI twenty times a day. As a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, I once asked AI, Could you help me with my sixth step? Could you tell me what my character defects are? And AI was even more effective than some of the best sponsors I've had at identifying my blind spots and weaknesses.
Dr. Martin: Right! But you are an educated person who knows how to write prompts. Think of an immigrant or a poor family who doesn't know how to frame prompts, but can speak. They can be assisted by an AI agent that says, Hey Maria, how's it going today? Remember, you told me you wanted to spend more time with your grandchildren? Social workers are overworked, so technology can step in to provide that coaching. I'm very excited about the future, though a little scared when I hear on TV that AI could be used to create viruses! I didn't enjoy COVID, so I hope another one isn't coming.
Dave: Right, agreed. To pivot—I call this podcast Human Up. It has been an absolute joy speaking with you for 30 minutes, and I'm even more inspired about Thrive Lights, the Poverty Stoplight, and your framework for solving social problems. Although I'm an ant compared to what you're doing, working in just one city, you've helped me reframe how I can leverage these tools. Since the name of the podcast is Human Up, can you tell me what human up means to you?
Dr. Martin: That's beautiful. First, putting that title out there forces people to reflect on it. What do you mean, human up? Aren't we humaning up all the time? Well, apparently not! Second, I want to thank a mutual friend, Jessica Kantor from Nevada, who introduced me to you. If she ever listens to this, I love her a lot—she's a fantastic human being. She introduced me to many things, including her Greek Jewish background. She made me want to see the movie Odysseus. Have you seen it?
Dave: I did see it. I liked it, despite being disappointed when it strayed from the literal text—the creator took some liberties. But speaking of Jessica, she co-authored a book called Saving Lily with me. So I have even more accolades and respect for her. She's amazing, and I'm grateful to have worked with her for the last fifteen years.
Dr. Martin: I agree with you! Now, on human up—let's bring in a little more compassion and listen to others more. Why are we all fighting about politics and the president? Politics has its place, but it shouldn't dominate our lives. We need to understand why other people have different perspectives. As my friend Ken Wilber says, Perspective is rationality. People's perspectives make sense from where they see the world. So let's learn to listen, hold people's hands, work together, and embrace ambiguity. Why does everything have to be black and white? Let's enjoy our friends, family, and neighbors, reach out to a cousin we haven't talked to in years, lower the noise, and human up. Relax! It's not that serious.
Dave: Amen. Thank you for spending time with me today—you brought me joy.
Dr. Martin: You brought me joy, too! I can't wait to visit your program. Keep an eye out for our upcoming book, The Mirror and the Map. It highlights American success stories of struggling communities thriving through small tweaks, listening to people, and incorporating love and compassion into daily work. Let's have fun!
Dave: While we all human up! Thanks for being a guest, and I can't wait to visit with you again soon.
Dr. Martin: Thank you, Dave, and hello to everyone listening. I hope to have more of these conversations. Bye-bye.
Dave: Thank you, Dr. Burt.
Dr. Martin: Thank you.