Wickedly Smart Woefully Stupid Podcast

What Threads Have We Been Pulling This Whole Time?

The smoke is back over Washington this summer, the way it is over a few thousand other places right now — and that's where this conversation starts. But it doesn't stay there.

This is the tenth, and possibly final episode of this run, and Wendy and Harvey pull all of the threads of the stories they have been exploring at once. If you've been reading the headlines and feeling like there are a million separate emergencies out there, Harvey has a proposition — that there may be far fewer than that. Maybe only one, told in a lot of different zip codes.

What follows is a kind of inventory of everything this show has been quietly assembling. Wendy brings the forest, the watershed, the estuary — the places where two different worlds touch, and something richer happens at the seam.

Harvey brings the long view and a question he's been sitting with about what we forgot on the way to building a civilization this remarkable. Along the way there's Apollo 13, a coffee farm in Colombia, Teddy Roosevelt, and a woman on a sidewalk who recognized Wendy's "grounded walking."

There's some grief here, because of course, a year of these conversations doesn't leave you unchanged, and neither does watching the sky turn orange every August. But there's also something surprisingly practical at the end of it. The two of them each dream about what they'd want to see next for the world, and then they land somewhere much smaller and closer to home than either of them expected.

Ten conversations and four hundred tangents that never made the cut. Thank you for coming along.

Come think with us, once again.

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What Does Democracy Actually Feel Like From the Inside?

Most conversations about democracy right now feel like arguments — volleys of talking points launched from entrenched positions, designed to win rather than illuminate. This episode is something different.

This week, Wendy sits down with her partner, Mike Long, a lifelong student of history and human psychology, and, together with Harvey, the three of them do something that feels almost radical in 2026: they just... think out loud together. About where we came from, what we might be losing, and whether the thing we call democracy has ever actually delivered on its promise — and for whom.

Mike brings 2,000 years of context to a moment that desperately needs it. Harvey brings the psychological reckoning. Wendy brings the land, the women, the wolves, and the uncomfortable questions that refuse to stay politely in the margins. What emerges isn’t a debate or a lecture — it’s the kind of conversation that used to happen in forums and on front porches and at dinner tables before we all retreated into our separate information ecosystems.

There’s grief in this episode, and there’s also genuine hope — not the performative kind, but the kind that comes from actually knowing history well enough to recognize that we’ve pulled ourselves back from the brink before.

Come think with us.

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What if the way you love was shaped before you could even speak — and what if that same pattern is running our institutions, our politics, our planet?

In this episode, Wendy and Harvey sit down with transformational relationship mentor Dr. Gary Salyer to explore the hidden architecture of attachment — the early patterns that wire us for connection, conflict, or shutdown long before we have words for any of it.

But this conversation doesn't stop at the personal. Anxious clinging, avoidant walls, the compulsive need to dominate or disappear — these aren't just relationship dynamics. They're the operating system behind our most intractable social fractures. What does a society organized around insecure attachment actually look like? (Spoiler: look around.)

Dr. Salyer makes the case that interdependence — real, secure, practiced interdependence — isn't just a relationship goal. It might be the missing variable in every system we're trying to fix.

Wickedly Smart: The neuroscience and attachment theory behind why we love, fight, and organize the way we do. Woefully Stupid: That we keep trying to solve collective problems without ever examining the relational wiring underneath them.

The personal isn't just political. It's ecological, institutional, and civilizational.

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What if nature had a seat at the table — not as a resource to be managed, but as a voice to be heard?

In this episode, Wendy and Harvey dig into Alexandra Pimor's Nature on Board movement — a radical, quietly spreading idea that nature deserves representation in the very boardrooms and decision-making bodies shaping its future.

From Ecuador writing the rights of Pachamama into its constitution, to New Zealand granting legal personhood to a forest and a river, to Patagonia transferring its ownership entirely to the earth — something is shifting. The question is whether it's shifting fast enough, and whether it can reach the places that matter most: corporate boards, legislative chambers, and the governance structures that set the rules everyone else follows.

Wendy knows what it's like to stand inside a real ecosystem and speak for it. Harvey knows what it costs when no one does. Together, they ask the uncomfortable question: how many catastrophically expensive, planet-damaging mistakes could we have avoided if nature had simply had someone in the room?

Wickedly Smart: Nature-conscious governance — from legal personhood for rivers to nature proxies on corporate boards. Woefully Stupid: That we gave corporations personhood centuries ago and are only now thinking to extend the same courtesy to the living world.

The FY2026 EPA budget is $8.8B. Cumulatively (1970-2025), it's estimated budget is $350.6B. Imagine what else we could have achieved if we'd just had Nature at the center of our institutions.

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The soil beneath your feet is a living system. So why do we treat it like dirt?

In this episode, Wendy and Harvey sit down with sustainability pioneer and transdisciplinary systems thinker Erin Dayl — a woman who has spent 25 years at the intersection of clean energy, regenerative agriculture, social justice, and the kind of organizational thinking that actually moves things forward.

From breaking a 50-year energy contract in rural New Mexico, to building tribal energy sovereignty, to designing what a truly regenerative company might look like from the ground up — Erin is someone who doesn’t just study transformation. She architects it.

The conversation ranges wide: why solar is cheap but political, what precision agriculture can and can’t fix, how a farm worker should be able to talk to a CFO without fear, and what it actually means to scale something without losing its soul. Spoiler: it looks a lot less like owning more and a lot more like sharing well.

Wickedly Smart: Regenerative agriculture as a systems solution — for soil health, water savings, food nutrition, and community resilience. Woefully Stupid: That we keep applying industrial-scale thinking to problems that require relational, place-based ones.

We are in a Buckminster Fuller moment, Erin says. People have found their line in the sand — and they’re building the world they want on the other side of it.

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What would Teddy Roosevelt think of today's world — and what would you do if you were president? Wendy and Harvey kick off with a powerful (if possibly misappropriated) Roosevelt quote about leaving the land better for future generations, then trace the arc from his bold conservation legacy to today's dismantling of public lands and the silencing of climate from mainstream discourse. Along the way, they wrestle with “conventional wisdom,” the politics of natural resources, $15 bags of grapes, and whether a Thomas Paine-style catalytic moment could still shift the cultural narrative. They end up somewhere unexpected: a shared presidential platform, a tag-team ticket, and a genuine question — what would it take to make stewardship, equity, and connection to the land the default values of society again?

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This week, Harvey and Wendy interview author and peacebuilder Danielle Reiff about the keys to reuniting people and healing democracy. Danielle is developing a four step process to re-engaging people, re-connecting them, listening to them, and organizing our systems around what people really want and need.

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What do 8.4 billion people on one planet have in common? Hot beverages like coffee and tea. Since we're in the US, where coffee is more prevalent, we venture down the rabbit hole of the origins of coffee, the reasons for its popularity and the impact of this well-loved crop on the environment and the global economy. Join us!

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Episode 2 of Wickedly Smart and Woefully Stupid explores the 30th anniversary of the movie Apollo 13 as a metaphor for where our planet is right now. In Harvey's imagination, we are a space craft in orbit with everyone watching to see if we make it back OK. We talk about all 8.4 billion of us being on a spaceship called Earth together and how we're flawed, amazing, and human all at the same time.

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This isn't a podcast where two people have all the answers. It's a podcast where two people are genuinely trying to figure things out together, in real time, with plenty of laughter at our own contradictions.Harvey and Wendy come from different disciplines.

He's a communicator and creative strategist; she's a forest scientist and organizational consultant. They share a fascination with complex systems and how humans navigate (or fail to navigate) them. They're interested in biomimicry, ecological intelligence, why organizations resist the very changes they say they want, and what forests might teach us about governance.

Each episode, Harvey and Wendy pick a topic where human brilliance and human foolishness show up in the same frame. They explore it from multiple angles. They disagree sometimes. They laugh a lot. They try to land somewhere that's neither cynical nor naively optimistic, and that acknowledges both what we're capable of as humans and what we're actually doing.

Welcome. Please be kind.

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