F055 What do pink socks have to do with digital health? (Nick Adkins)

If you go to digital health conferences, you might have noticed people wearing pink socks. Or a guy with a long beard and a kilt caught your eye.

That was Nick Adkins - the Co-Founder of Pinksocks Life, a nonprofit organization focused on promoting authentic human connection around the world. Pinksocks was founded five years after Nick attended Burning man in 2010.

For those who don’t know it - Burning man is a special community, which gathers once a year in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada. Where there is nothing most of the time in the year, 70.000 people gather each August. To enjoy life according to ten principles: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, participation, immediacy, and leave no trace.

Burning Man is known by amazing art, music, and mutant vehicles driving around, but it offers its visitors educational workshops, group discussions and more.

Many people that have been at Burning man say, it transformed them. They consequently take some of the lessons with them to the real-default world, Nick being one of them.

In this episode, Nick talks about the background behind the kilt, impact Pinksocks has had so far and the general encouragement to everyone to fear people less, and see the good in them.

In Nick's rough estimate, there are around 100.000 members of the Pinksocks movement.

With such a number of supporters, the natural question is, is the community going to transform into something commercial? "Pinksocks movement is an opportunity to celebrate someone other than yourself. We don't want to monetize it. We wish to keep it as far from business as possible. This doesn't mean the movement doesn't have a real-world impact. “ Teachers such as Ms. Blancas teach kids about positive values in school and the Pinksocks tribe contributed 1200 pairs of socks to a school in Texas to support that mission.

"It happened numerous times that a member would tweet about the need for a doctor, for example, while in Spain, and another member would respond within minutes with support," explains Nick Adkins. Asked if they considered systemizing connections between members to enhance access to medical professionals or medicine, Nick's response is that there's probably already an app for that or a startup working on a solution. Pinksocks though, is striving to move people towards their humanity.

"We've become so connected to technology that we disconnected from each other. Pinksocks encourages you to reconnect. Stop, may it be on a train, conference, elsewhere to listen to someone else. Everybody's got a story to tell. You just need to stop and listen. And tell someone: I see you. I hear you. This is the ultimate reward of being human."

As a final message to existing and new members of the tribe, Nick says:

“We make choices every day of what we will be like. Pinksocks is a catalyst to be better."

If you’re interested in seeing pink socks energy in action, go to Twitter and search for #pinksocks.

Website: https://pinksocks.life/about-us/