Martín Carcasson about the Center for Public Deliberation and overcoming toxic polarization

Welcome on another episode of Democracy Innovator podcast and our guest of today is Martin Carcassone, that is the director of the Colorado State University Center for Public

Deliberation.

So thank you for your time, Martin.

Thank you for having me.

Excited for the conversation.

And as a first question, I would like to ask you what is actually doing the Center for Public Deliberation.

Yeah, so I'm a professor in communication studies.

My academic background was in argumentation, which is a sub-discipline that really focuses on the quality of the argument.

How do we make distinctions between strong arguments and weak arguments and help us have better discussions so we have better decisions and better quality of life?

And so I've always been focused on how do we talk about tough issues?

How do we come together to address our shared problems?

And I started the center now 19 years ago at CSU.

It serves as an impartial resource, primarily from the Northern Colorado community, but we do some statewide stuff.

I train students in dedicated classes as facilitators, and then we design and run events in the community.

actually get hired by the city or the county or community organizations or get written in drafts to just have better events to help people have conversations.

A lot of my work used to be analyzing how politicians, particularly American presidents, talked about issues.

But I grew more more frustrated because they often did badly.

They often did not kind of, they ignored the research or they tried to kind of sell simple stories to win elections.

So I grew frustrated.

I didn't want to spend 50 years writing papers about how badly people talked about issues.

So the CBD became, okay, how do we create processes that incentivize better arguments and help people come together and have these conversations?

So that's all my work now is to help other cities

Most of my focus is local.

How do we build capacity in our cities for better conversations to help people come together, to have a tough conversation, to bring expertise and the public voice and the

passions and the values of multiple diverse pluralistic perspectives all together to actually make better decisions.

and which kind of conversation have you facilitated?

oh

we've run over 500 meetings.

So we're process experts, not content experts.

So we get hired.

We've done stuff on climate change.

We've done stuff on decarbonization.

We've done a lot of stuff on housing.

We've done, mean, runs the gamut.

We've done, we work a lot with our schools.

So we do a lot of schools issues, whether that's mental health issues or, you know, standardized testing.

We do stuff on transportation.

So it's all over the place.

Every semester, it's something new.

We'll do, you know,

four or five different kind of projects.

And we have a pretty big toolkit, engagement toolkit, so we're designing specific processes based on the issue to help people have these conversations.

Okay, and can you make maybe an example of how a conversation, a discussion should be held?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, you know, it's the Center for Public Deliberation.

So the word we use is deliberation, which is a particular way of talking.

I make a distinction between, a debate, a dialogue, and a deliberation.

And for me, deliberation is designed to kind of bring out the best of debate and dialogue.

So debate is a good debate.

Most debates are horrible.

But a well-designed debate helps elevate good arguments and expose bad arguments and helps us make sense of information.

And a dialogue is designed to bring people together in more productive ways and to depolarize and help us understand each other and build trust.

So deliberation tries to take both of those together.

But for most of our events, the downside of deliberation is it takes a lot more resources and a lot more time.

So we spend often a couple months diving into the issue, trying to make sense of the noise, interviewing different sides, doing fact checking.

And one critical aspect of deliberation, particularly how we do it, is most of our events, we create some sort of discussion guide, some sort of uh document that people are reacting

to that we've developed to try to capture the issue, to frame it in a way that's much more productive.

A lot of our work we're trying to, especially in the United States, where we're so polarized with a two-party system, uh bad arguments are constantly incentivized.

So we're trying to reframe the issue, often getting away from

progressive versus conservative or Democrat versus Republican.

How do we frame this more as an issue we all care about?

then typically, it's a problem we're focusing on.

We're looking at multiple potential ways of engaging that problem that all have, upside all have downside and there's no magic bullets.

So what the event looks like, we'll often start at the front of the room maybe for 15, 20 minutes to kind of explain the topic and explain what we're doing.

But then my students, you 100 people show up, we can send them out.

They're at 15 different tables.

I have two students at every table, one facilitating and one note taking, and maybe six to eight people at each of those tables.

And they're walking through this process that we've designed, reacting to that document, having conversation, a student trained in conflict management and deliberative techniques

to help them have deeper conversations.

Our processes in particular,

Instead of like a public hearing or a one at time of the microphone for a lot of government engagement processes, they're designed for people to talk to each other.

So we're not just collecting individual opinions, we're having people react to each other and react to the document and come up with kind of better ideas of what we can do to move

forward.

And do you think that in relationship to this process, technology can help in some way?

Or maybe you also tested some tools, I don't know.

I've certainly with the explosion of AI the last few years, I've been exploring that a lot more.

And obviously with COVID, you know, in 2020, we couldn't do face-to-face events like we did, and we switched to Zoom.

And in some ways, it was a very similar event, right?

We started together in one big room, and then at some point we would send people to breakout rooms, and my students would be each those breakout rooms.

So.

At least the Zoom technology allowed us to do very similar things, especially with the video and aspect.

But now I just went to a conference, what, two or three weeks ago, Northwestern University in Chicago is starting a new Center for Enlightened Disagreement that I'm helping them

out.

And they had a conference, like a pedagogy conference, how do we help build skills for students on how to disagree better, how to engage complex issues and talk to each other.

And they brought in 10 people doing innovative stuff in this area.

So I was there to talk about my program, but there was quite a few people that were using AI to, you how can we use AI to help people think better?

How can we use AI to help people disagree better and engage better?

And I saw some really interesting tools.

think overall, I'm a little nervous about AI, right?

I see a lot of downsides there, but it was the first time I left for a conference.

I'm like, okay, I am excited about seeing some potential upside to this.

And then certainly that.

How do we work to make sure we get more of the upside and less of the downside?

So I think there's a lot of new technology tools that are coming out, a lot in the deliberation world of people just kind of realizing, how might we adapt these tools to

help us think better, to help us engage better?

And I think there's some promise there.

Yeah, and in relationship to the downside effects, like uh all the negative effects related to AI, do you have anything like you are thinking about something specifically or

like, I don't know, like deep fake, all the things that can, you know.

mean, a lot of like one of the key problems that I I frame kind of the biggest issues we're dealing with broadly in democracy and my work is primarily US based.

But I think a lot of these issues are international now or for all democracies.

I talk about three key problems.

One is just this hyper polarization, this toxic polarization, right?

We're so divided.

And when we're divided, we can't talk to each other.

Right.

Facts don't work.

You know, and it just incentivizes all this bad behavior.

So lot of my work is to depolarize.

which is often easier than we think, because I think a lot of the polarization is exaggerated, right?

We're not nearly as divided as we think we are.

And when we come together, we often realize that, right?

So that's the first problem.

The second problem I call is information disorder.

And that's just, you know, our ability to create and share information has exponentially exploded in the world, right?

We have so much information out there, so much noise.

Our ability to make sense of that information, to make distinctions, to...

elevate good arguments and expose bad arguments to move from just noise to data to hopefully to insight to knowledge, eventually to wisdom, has not only not kept up with the

technology, but has actually backtracked.

We've lost trust in journalism.

We've lost trust in universities.

We lost trust in expertise.

So in some ways, AI contributes to that problem because AI is creating information and just flooding so much information.

struggles to make distinctions between misinformation and good information.

But again, at that conference, what I saw is, hey, can we redirect AI to help us make sense of that?

If we can train AI to help us make these distinctions, to separate the wheat from the chaff.

So yeah, think generally AI is just adding more to the noise.

But how do we switch and focus on, OK, how does AI help us?

So like training my students how to search for good sources.

You know, I'm concerned of them using AI to say, hey, you know, give me evidence that I'm right, right?

Which is, you know, part of the problem.

Our brains, you know, we're motivated reasoners and my side bias and confirmation bias.

you know, AI just makes it easier for them to just cherry pick information to fit their perspective, right?

But if we train our students to say, to go on AI to say, hey, what am I missing here?

Right.

uh What are the best arguments against my position?

Right.

To ask, you know, steal me in the supposing position or.

help me understand multiple perspectives on this issue, right?

Can we get them to use it?

And then helping them to teach AI to find solid sources for those perspectives, not just find the first thing that kind of comes, right?

So that's where we're starting to learn to adapt of, how do we use this technology to help us?

The other big thing is when I talk about debate, dialogue and deliberation, and all three are important if they're high quality, debate and dialogue, I think are limited in certain

ways, em but...

debate and dialogue are much easier, right?

I can design a debate and a dialogue pretty quickly.

Deliberation takes a lot more time, both beforehand to understand the issue and deliberation takes more resources because I need facilitators, right?

I need two students for every six people.

That's a lot of people power, right?

What I did see at that conference was an AI facilitator that for the first time, I've been asked about creating facilitation robots for 20 years.

It was the first time I actually saw some promise there.

If we're able to figure that out, if we're able to have an AI facilitator that really helps people come together and helps individuals think better, that takes away one of the

kind of biggest costs of deliberation.

We'll be able to deliberate more because we don't have to have this army of facilitators that um have to be trained to help us do that.

So that's one thing I'm pretty excited about.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I'm very interested by polarized group.

uh So as an example, the two party system in the US, ah what happens if two people are very polarized?

How to break this polarization?

uh Because I can imagine that could be very deep also, like in...

Yeah, I mean, think a lot of our work, that's part of the design of the discussion guides, right?

We're framing something from an impartial kind of perspective to reframe the issue, because so many issues, the dominant frame of political issues in the United States is

Democrats versus Republicans.

And that's a very bad frame.

That's a very simplistic frame.

um So often just reframing the issue and not kind of framing it in that way really helps, starts changing.

And that's where when people come together in a better

process, instead of going with the easy story that the problem is caused by the other side, all of a we're able to shift it and see them.

A lot of my work is to try to shift people from seeing the other side as an opponent that they have to beat, that they have to vanquish, to as potential collaborator.

And a lot of this, a big part of my work I should mention, I do a lot of work in social psychology and brain science and how our brains are wired.

And for me, deliberation is a particular tool that's really well designed

to try to overcome, to avoid triggering the worst of human nature and actually tap in the best.

But the reality is our brain, the reason we're so polarized, the core root cause of it is our brains are wired for polarization.

We want simple, right?

We want heroes and victims and villains.

um We don't wanna, we're cognitive misers to use Conahan's term from the thinking fast and thinking slow, right?

We don't wanna think so much, right?

And then a two party system, unfortunately,

takes advantage of that right most of a two-party system is I don't have to listen to the other side I don't have to try to convince the other side I mainly just have to fire up my

side right I have to kind of mobilize the people that are agree with me well the kind of messages that work to do that are very simple messages particularly you know attacking the

other side and blaming them right so most of our messages are designed to kind of fire up each side all my work is

How do we bring those sides together?

And how do we tap into a lot of people that aren't on a side?

And the best part of shifting from the simple stories and loving our heroes and victims and villains, the best of human nature is humans are incredibly good creative problem

solvers when put in a good situation to tap into that part of our brain.

I mean, it's just sad so much, particularly in the United States.

how little our political processes are designed to bring out us as problem solvers, right?

It's mainly designed to blame the other side for the problems.

So that's the heart of deliberation is we're creating a different environment.

So instead of these simple arguments that divide us and don't help us solve problems, uh we shift that to a very different kind of conversation.

So I'm thinking that polarization in some ways is helpful to the actual political system.

I mean, how it works with the two parties, but probably is the same also.

I mean, in Italy maybe we don't have the two parties, but yeah, also in Europe is maybe the same.

Yeah, I think it starts with human nature and then the political system often encourages that division.

Our media systems, especially as media gets more more partisan and we have more narrow casting, we have more media for individual groups versus a media that everyone trusts,

which certainly in United States we have very little of that.

um And then most of our technical platforms, our social media, is also more designed to divide people and kind of categorize them.

uh

So we start with human nature that's susceptible to these simplistic divisive messages.

And then our political system, our media system, and then our technology makes it all worse.

So that's what we're up against.

But again, the good news is we're seeing more and more, even with technology, we're seeing some really cool innovative ideas of creating like pro-social social media, bridging

social media.

Social media, particularly in a local community that's much more designed.

the algorithms are designed to bring people together versus divide them and separate them.

So I think you're seeing more and more reaction of new ways to adjust these systems, the political system, the media system, and the technological, the social media platforms, to

stop doing so much of the divisive work and actually uh repairing some of that.

Do you think that in the future, let's say if there is more...

uh If people are more aware about the deliberative practices, uh they can also overcome this...

this biological polarization that you said our brains are...

Yeah, yeah, no, I mean, that's certainly the long term hope of the work that I do.

I feel very comfortable.

Like I said earlier, we've run about 500 meetings in the last 19 years.

Almost every single one of those meetings have gone well, right?

And we've taken on some pretty complex, controversial kind of tough issues.

We know, regardless of how crazy things are with the polarization and division and so forth that we're getting here in the world, uh deliberative scholars, deliberative

practitioners, uh democratic innovation practitioners know like,

Hey, when you bring people together using the tools that we know work to bring people together across perspective as well, humans can do this, right?

So there's still a lot of optimism.

We just need to build capacity.

We know what to do.

We just need to build capacity to do it, right?

But I feel every time someone comes to one of the CBD events or other events that my colleagues across the world are doing, they see an alternative that works, right?

And the CBD, when I started it, I thought, no, my students and I will pick a topic, maybe once a semester we'll do some event.

But every event we did, we'd get 10 people to walk up and say, we need to do this again.

We need to do this on this issue.

When we gave someone an alternative, people saw the value of it.

People want to engage genuinely, right?

So that's our goal is, and I work with a lot with, I work with cities, I work with universities, I work with libraries, with community foundations, with local newsrooms.

How do we tap into these local civic organizations?

and say, hey, y'all need to work together to build this capacity to give people a chance to have these different conversations.

And I do think the more people see it, while the negative aspects of human nature uh are stronger, they're more natural, they're not determinate.

And people, the more people, there's a virtuous cycle of doing this deliberative work.

The more people talk differently, the easier the next conversation is.

They start rewiring their brain.

And then we start developing different individual habits.

We start developing different organizational kind of norms and hopefully community cultures of, you we talk differently here.

One last thing I'll say is I believe at a CPD event or most deliberative events that people kind of do these type of things.

If someone shows up with a very simple solution to a complex problem, they look silly, right?

People are like, that's not what we're doing here, right?

Like we're doing a hardware, we're serious people.

trying to kind of engage this complex issue.

But in the broader world, the one at a the microphone or online or certainly now uh in government, uh unfortunately, they're constantly giving us very simple solutions to

complex problems.

um And for most people, we like simple solutions because we don't want to deal with the tensions and the paradoxes and the complexities.

We want to believe our side's right and the other side's evil.

So those simple narratives work at the national level.

Our goal is to show people at the local level that that's not the way the world works.

And then hopefully the more they get exposed to that, the more they start the simple solute, the simple strategies of the national level stop working so much because we

realize our brain like, yeah, I know my brain wants a simple solution.

You're trying to feed me one.

No, I'm not going to fall for that because I know the world's more complex.

And do you have other examples of polarization like the ones of the two parties?

Maybe something that is common in the US?

Yeah, well, one way for when we do local stuff, one of the things that we're dealing with is often like, say, a city council or a school board or a county government, it has a

specific ordinance that they're they're engaging the public.

Should we do this?

Well, in most cases, that's going to be about one specific solution, right?

Here's one way we can deal with this problem.

And we're engaging the community.

Basically on this yes-no question, do you support this one solution?

There's a lot of problems with that.

That can cause a lot of polarization because it's a two-sided thing again.

It might not be Democrat versus Republican or conservative versus progressive, but it's the yes versus the no.

And that causes two big problems.

One is we know from the research the no's are gonna show up more.

If uh I see a new idea that my city or my school district is doing,

and I think it's a good idea, I'm like, ooh, that sounds great.

And I go on with my day, right?

If I think it's a bad idea, I'm like, hell no, right?

And I'm gonna show up and complain about it.

So most public engagement on, if we're looking at one solution, one ordinance, one bill at a time, it's gonna be dominated by the people pushing back the critics, right?

And then the second thing is, if it's a yes, no question, most people that show up have already answered yes or no before they walk in the door.

So from my perspective, their brains are off, right?

They're not there to think, they're not there to get creative, they're not there to listen, they're not there to come up with an innovative way to deal with this issue or to

reframe it.

They're there to support their perspective, right?

So the parts of their brain, the motivated reasoning, that's my side bias, that I wanna seek out information I'm right and ignore or dismiss, that gets magnified.

So what deliberation does is instead of, hey, here's one potential solution to a problem that we're gonna focus on,

we back up and we say, we want to focus on the issue.

The dominant question for me for deliberation is, hey, what should we do about X?

We being the community as a whole, right?

And that means, yes, the government, but it also means nonprofit organizations and non-governmental organizations and private industries and individuals and groups, right?

And then the X is a problem and we work really hard to frame it as a problem.

Like we all agree it's a problem.

We might disagree on why it's a problem.

We'll certainly disagree what we should do about it, right?

But we're starting from a point of common ground.

How do we come together and say, hey, what should we do about this shared problem that we have?

And then often the discussion guide might have three or four different options.

We use the National Issues Forum model in ifi.org in the United States that for 50 years have been creating this discussion guides that are framed to help people have better

conversations, right?

And to get away from one solution at a time.

So that's kind of our base model we have.

lots of other kind of models we use, we start there, hey, what should we do about X?

Here's three or four approaches or options that we can do.

None of them are a magic bullet, right?

None of them, there's no simple technical solution to these complex problems.

But then people are reacting to that.

And what that does is it sparks collaboration, it sparks creativity, it taps into the best parts of our brain because we're working together to try to address a shared problem

versus showing up to defend a perspective.

that had already been decided before the meeting started.

If someone wants to run a deliberation process in his town, um should it be something, the topic, it be real, so something that can polarize a lot, but that I think ah can be

difficult.

Well, yeah.

ah sometimes because I thought maybe doing a test with a test topic so uh

give a lot of workshops uh to city managers and librarians and schools and so forth that want to start doing this work.

And it's often like the first question after my presentation is like, okay, how can I do this with this one topic that's completely polarizing and dividing my community?

Everyone hates each other.

I'm like, you're probably not going to start there, right?

I mean, it's kind of hard to like, we're going to show people a different way of talking on the most difficult issue, right?

So like when I started the CBD for the first few years, you know, we picked difficult issues, but not the most difficult, right?

You know, let's start learning these new skills.

Let's start learning how to talk to each other.

Let's start learning how to ask good questions.

know, so I picked real issues.

We didn't want to just be educational, right?

We were working on real issues in the community.

But yeah, kind of picking something in the middle there, right?

Not so simple, but not the most difficult.

But then the idea is,

again, the virtuous cycle, the more you do this, the easier it is to do.

You start learning how to do the skills and the community starts learning the vocabulary and they see the value of it.

So then slowly and surely you can take on more and more difficult issues because people start realizing, this stuff is, yeah, this is more complex.

We need to think differently and talk differently from this.

And do you have some example about some good issues to discuss that can be real so people can actually talk and...

Yeah, yeah, we've done, there's obviously I'm here in the United States, so there's tons of resource growing kind of resources.

Even like the last 10 years, a number of organizations that are doing this stuff, but then also a lot of international sources.

Democracy Next is one of the biggest international ones.

I'll give you some links if you want to kind of post with it if people want to hear more about these kind of things.

But yeah, I mean, some of the issues, again, you're trying to find that issue, like I said earlier, that most people agree it's a problem.

eh So you're starting with that common ground, right?

So you can fit that what you do with X.

So we do a lot of stuff on like housing availability, right?

How do we kind of deal with that issue?

We deal with social media type of things, dealing with resources.

We've done some really interesting stuff on kind of energy and decarbonization, right?

Because we all want, we don't want energy to be too expensive.

Most of us are realizing we need to decarbonize and get away from.

uh natural gas and coal and lean more on wind and solar and other kind of alternatives.

But we know that technology is not quite there yet in some ways.

And obviously in Europe, particularly in France, know nuclear is a huge issue, which is now part of the conversation.

So that's a good issue to think about.

Okay, how do we work together to kind of do this?

And if a big part of the path we're taking is to completely decarbonize,

Well, we recognize there's whole industries and people that are working in those areas.

So how do we incorporate that?

How do we help have a just transition?

How do we think about the jobs that might be lost with that?

So we lean into those complexities instead of just picking a side and kind of talking past each other.

I'm thinking about is deliberation a practice that is always the same like around the world or also around the US?

Are there different kinds of deliberation schools or practices?

Yeah, no, I I think there's there's a quite a big toolkit, right?

So I mentioned in I.F.

that was my initial training and we still kind of do that a little bit.

uh Certainly, citizens assembly.

actually did just did a citizens assembly or a civic assembly here in Fort Collins.

That's a particular tool of you're doing a random sample and bringing people together a panel of 30 years or so, sometimes much larger that that are often paid.

and then have a significant amount of time.

The one we did here was over four days.

Some of them are longer than that, that you're bringing these people together.

Deliberative polling, which is coming out of the Jim Fishkins shop at Stanford University Center for Democratic Deliberation is a whole nother kind of different way.

So yeah, there's a broad kind of range of tools.

I think that the common ground across all of them are, it's someone.

It's a process design perspective.

There's a facilitator.

There's someone who's designing it particularly for me, often from an impartial perspective, their goal, their expertise is process, not content.

And you have facilitation, you have these discussion guides, there's some basic uh elements to it, borrowed from several fields, right?

Some of this is from conflict resolution, some of it's from deliberation, some of it is from...

I bring a lot of concepts from the business world, from collaborative problem solving of how do we work together to address these issues in terms of like polarity management and

both in thinking that are kind of incorporated that.

So it's a very interdisciplinary academically, but then also very kind of cutting across many practices that it's all coming together with that focus on how do we help people have

better conversation.

Having conversation or deliberating is something that requires time.

I wonder how much time should people dedicate to this activity uh to be able to actually do it and also to have a healthy society so people that are able to communicate.

Yeah, I mean, in some ways, it's the more time the better, but then the more time is a bigger ask for people.

Right.

And that's one of the challenges, certainly.

Most of our meetings that we do now for the city are going to be, they used to always be two hours.

Now they're normally like two and a half, three hours, because we know people will come.

And that allows us to do a deeper dive into some things and have some pretty tough conversations.

uh Sometimes having an all day event uh or a longer thing.

A lot of our projects now also

we might meet a few different times, right?

So we have an initial meeting to kind of get us an initial reaction to the document and help us refine the document.

Maybe a few weeks later, there's lots of different ways of doing it.

But yeah, it is something.

mean, the main thing, deliberation is synchronous.

Deliberation is people together at the same time, whether that's face-to-face, in person, or that's online, right?

And I mean, there's some ways.

to have a secretness, like a message board and people are kind of going back and forth that people are kind of experimenting with.

But for me, so much of the heart of deliberation is real people talking to each other and reacting to each other and kind of bringing that back.

um That I think that that's typically one key aspect of deliberation.

So having to have people at the same place at the same time um with some time to dedicate is certainly one of the drawbacks, one of the burdens, one of the costs.

of deliberative processes.

I think long term, the more people do this, they realize the value and importance of it.

And I'll say, people enjoy it.

One of the favorite things in my events, I always kind of stand by the door as people are leaving to thank them for their time.

you could tell they're exhausted.

You could tell we made their brains work in ways they're not used to working.

But most of them realize they just did something important.

They realized, yeah, we need to do this.

This is how we should do things.

We should have these conversations.

And they're willing to come back.

So yes, it's hard work.

it's not, I wouldn't say it's fun necessarily, but sometimes it can be.

uh another way, another tool in the toolkit um is to gamify public engagement, to turn it into a game, turn it into different kind of.

Things and you so we've done stuff with Legos and done stuff with poker chips and you know So there's ways we can kind of make it a more fun for people in different ways uh But the

most important thing is I think people see the value out of it at the end of it and then ask to do more and I think that's pretty typical for My colleagues that do this kind of

work locally the more you do it the more people want to do it and it starts kind of building capacity and and hopefully providing a uh

a realistic alternative to what we're getting in these polarized politics.

I'm very interested by this gamification aspect.

Like you mentioned, LEGO sessions also using LEGO.

So how does it work?

So that was for something that we were doing on housing.

um So Northern Colorado, Four Collins is in Northern Colorado, about an hour north of Denver.

And we're a great place to live, right?

So more and more people are moving here, all the towns around us, we're getting a significant population increase.

But we also have some limitations, there's not that much water here in the West, right?

So there's growing concerns about how do we deal with this growth and those types of things.

So that was a process that we designed working with some partners.

It's almost, I forget the numbers now, it's been a few years, but it was kind of a design, a process of, we've got 200,000 people moving into our region here in the next five, 10

years.

Where do we put them?

Right?

So basically the Lego pieces, we had smaller Lego pieces that were like single-family homes.

And then we had larger that were duplexes and then even bigger ones that were apartments, right?

And we had a map.

So then each table kind of had to decide and they can, you know,

get 10 of the smaller pieces and change it for a bigger piece, right?

But that means more density and kind of building up, right?

So people want single family homes, but if everyone has a single family home, then we're not fitting these people.

And we have a lot more traffic and environmental impacts, right?

So that was trying to negotiate all these different things together.

So the Legos were a mechanism for them to kind of each table have a tangible way to kind of try to do this process.

I was curious, do you know if people were able to repeat the process by themselves after participating in a session?

Yeah, I do believe, mean, part of our basic kind of concept, and we see this so often in our meetings, say there's a two hour meeting, we always see and hear from our students

that the first third of that, the facilitator is doing a lot, right?

They're asking a lot of questions and they're, we call it intervening, they're intervening in the conversation to try to improve the conversation going back and forth.

uh The second third, they're doing it less, and then the last third, they're doing it even less.

because people start doing it themselves.

So part of the role of the facilitator as we're training them is to model how we have tough conversations, to ask interesting questions, to really listen, to paraphrase, to

repack.

So what I'm hearing, so all these skills that we're training the students, the facilitators to do, part of our goal is for the participants to pick up those skills.

And we see that again in just a two hour meeting, right?

The question, you know, earlier on a facilitator might ask, so that's really interesting.

You seem passionate about that.

I'm curious, what are the counter arguments?

People that disagree with you, what might be important to them?

One of my favorite questions, right?

To try to understand the values of the people that disagree with.

And, you know, that question the facilitator might ask in the first third, well, participants might ask each other that in the last third.

And we're hoping they're walking away from the event with new skills, right?

We have so much focus, again, as maybe a US context, so much of our education is about public speaking and presenting and writing a paper and communicating out.

We don't tend to teach people how to ask good questions of each other.

We don't teach them how to listen nearly as much as we need to.

Listening and asking good questions are hugely important, not only to democracy, but just to any kind of collaborative problem solving process.

So that becomes this thing, I think that's one of the reasons for the virtuous cycle.

The more people do this, the easier it's to do because they start learning how to do it.

And hopefully they go home and they have a different conversation.

We do a lot of training.

I do something with school districts of training a cohort of parents and community members in this work.

And part of the goal is hopefully when an issue comes up and it starts to polarize and a very simple kind of narrative starts dominating, they know how to push back.

And that might be in the coffee shop with another parent that's saying, can you believe the school district's doing X, Y, and Z?

they're, well, it's not that simple.

So certainly one of the goals of these deliberative processes is to build people's and hopefully to make it less likely that the simple stories and the worst of human nature

dominates our conversation.

And we start having better and better conversations on our

I was thinking about the role of education, also the role of schools.

It could be maybe important to have these kind of practices.

Yeah, I'll send you a link to a paper I wrote called The Wise Collaborator.

And I'm basically making the argument to rethink how we do civic education.

I think civic education often focuses a little too much on being informed and then being engaged.

Those two adjectives appear all the time, at least in the US.

Well, I know from the social psychology and brain science that often we think we're informed, but we're quite misinformed.

Because our brains are wired to, let me go find all the evidence I'm right.

uh So sometimes the more informed you are, the research shows with my side bias, often the smarter you are and the more educated you are, the more likely you're to be to suffer from

my side bias.

Because you just become really good at finding evidence that you're right and better at refuting or ignoring or avoiding evidence that you're wrong.

uh

So then when we're informed badly, we get engaged badly.

And a lot of times civic education is more activist education, which makes us feel good.

We pick a side and we fight for it, but it doesn't give us the skills to engage across difference.

So my work, I mainly run these meetings that temporarily we help people think better, but certainly long-term uh through K-12 education and higher ed, if we're training students

with these skills of, how do you talk to people that disagree with you?

How do you understand issues from multiple perspectives?

Then all of sudden, I think our brains are wired for outrage.

We can rewire our brains through education so they're much more suited for deliberation.

They're more deliberation ready than polarization ready.

And I think that's certainly kind of part of our goal moving forward.

And I was thinking, have you run any workshop with kids?

was it different compared to adults?

No, no, I mean, think, you know, so obviously our program is primarily undergraduate students are facilitators.

So we work a lot with college students, but then we also work a lot with our local high schools.

And we have, you know, we used to have a facilitation corps with the high school.

We train some of these high school students and then they would go run events in the lower schools, right, to help us come with school issues.

They would sometimes help with our events as well.

Lately, I'm not directly involved in this with my colleagues with the center.

um have a youth civic action program, what they're going into the high schools and teaching them collaborative problem solving skills.

It's kind of a negotiation between deliberation and activism, right?

It might be sometimes, hey, we want to do this issue, but how do we do that activism in a way that isn't so divisive and polarizing, but it's activism that brings people together.

So there's interesting kind of different ways of thinking about how do we move the needle on the issues we care about.

But those are working directly with high school students quite a bit.

they're able to do this stuff, right?

They normally see it as very helpful.

At least in the United States, we have a lot of young people are just so frustrated with the system, right?

The political system just seems to be, know, people just kind of yelling at each other and simplistic.

And so a lot of them have checked out.

So we give them this alternative, like, you here's a different way to engage these issues, particularly local, that that's going be much more hopeful and also, think, in the long

term, much more successful.

I haven't asked you anything about your professional background, so if you want to say something about academic professional background, how you arrived.

so my initial academic training again was I was trained to be a rhetorical critic and an argumentation scholar.

My early work focused on American presidents, how they talked about issues, and I grew more more frustrated because they didn't talk well.

I think I mentioned that a little bit earlier.

So then as I finished PhD, I kind of shifted from that being the focus to getting engaged in this dialogue and deliberation world.

understanding.

was uh taught more about debate and then I saw these tools of dialogue and deliberation as much more important, much more useful.

Now I kind of use all three.

But I kind of shifted from being, I'm probably not as much of, I'm more of a practitioner now or a pro-academic.

My work nicely, uh I do a lot of the theory, but then we run a lot of these events and that's always constantly kind of bouncing back and forth.

We get to practice and

test out these theories.

Most of our work is actually out in the community every day running these types of things.

So yeah, it's exciting to see uh a lot of this stuff growing m and encouraging people.

think every university, every college university in the country and the world should have a program like mine that's not only providing capacity to their local community, that

local communities severely need it.

but it's also teaching students these skills and giving people these examples of different ways of engaging.

And would you like to share something about your personal background, like also starting from when you were a child?

Yeah, well, it's my Dean.

I was born in Argentina.

I was born in Buenos Aires.

We moved to the States when I was pretty young.

So I grew up in Texas.

I grew up in Houston and then did all my schooling at Texas A And then I've been now in Colorado for the last 20 years.

Probably the other relevant thing is politically I've been kind of all over the map.

My parents were small business owners in Houston.

We owned a Baskin-Robbins ice cream store and then some daycare centers.

uh

grew up much more of a conservative household, at least conservative in the term of not being too happy about taxes and regulations and so forth and just wanting.

uh But then went to grad school and uh started getting interested in kind of bigger issues.

uh In some ways, I kind of became an angry progressive, somewhat Marxist maybe for a semester or two.

But then I realized, made me feel good, but I'm just kind of screaming at people and I didn't see that as a way to move forward.

So then I kind of shifted.

with some of my work of, you know, I made the decision, I guess, 20 years ago of, you know, if I dedicate my work to helping people have better conversations, I realize I think

I'm going to make more of an impact on the issues I care about by doing that, right?

I could become an activist, right?

And it'd be part of kind of the screaming back and forth.

And I'm like, the system's just not working, right?

So I decided I want to work on the system.

And the long-term hope is

If I believe one side or a particular perspective is the best perspective, my goal is to make the process work so well that the best arguments get elevated and the weak arguments

kind of get exposed.

And so I still believe idealistically, we're striving for an reachable ideal, I know, but I still believe we can create processes that reward quality thinking, that reward good

arguments, right?

uh

Our system often does the opposite, particularly a two party system with winner take all elections.

But we're seeing alternatives now.

And I think there's a lot of hope.

Again, I think we know what to do.

oh We just have to convince, build capacity in more communities to do it.

I really like your optimism, I also share it.

um In my life I saw a very strong polarization when there were like...

I would say big event like there could be it could be like with the war, Ukraine, Russia, because maybe there are different point of views could be the same with Israel, Palestine

could be the same also during COVID.

And sometimes I also saw that people stopped talking to each other because they started seeing

that person as a sort of enemy, oh while the difference was uh just that that person had a different idea about a specific situation.

uh

And also that made me think a lot about um how can be important to talk and not to...

And I don't know if something like this happened also to you if you have seen this kind of conflicts.

Yeah, you know, earlier I talked about kind of the three big challenges and I think I only talked about two of them.

So this opens up for the third one.

So I talked about toxic polarization being a key issue, this information overload.

And then the third one, the way I'm framing it now is conflict profiteers.

The easiest way to explain what I do is I try to design processes that avoid triggering the worshiping nature and actually tap into the best.

There's lots of people that are doing the opposite.

They understand the human nature and they're taking advantage of that.

Whether that's to win elections or to get rich, they get paid a lot more than me.

Unfortunately, they're working with the flow.

Again, our brains are more wired for what they're doing.

And we have to recognize that.

So sometimes when you focus so much on toxic polarization being the issue, and I do think it's a big issue, and you're focused so much on bringing people together, you might be

blind to some important distinctions.

and you're susceptible to getting kind of manipulated by these bad faith actors in a way.

So that becomes part of the work is, uh yes, one of the lines that's used now is like, you don't want to build a bridge between the arsonist and the firefighter, right?

You don't want to fall into a both sidesism or a false equivalency in assuming kind of all perspectives are the same.

It's another argument I make about debate, dialogue and deliberation.

Dialogue for me is primarily designed to bring people together from perspectives and understand each other and don't make negative assumptions about people and assume best

intentions.

All of that is really important, particularly to kind of shift from this exaggerated polarization to the actual.

But if we just do dialogue, dialogue for me tends to be non-judgmental.

Dialogue is, you know, we're just listening to each other's stories.

Well, in a democracy, at some point we have to make a decision.

We can't always just agree to disagree.

Right?

Democracy is not an educational exercise.

It's a mode of living, you to borrow from John Dewey.

It's a way of us kind of making decisions together.

Ultimately, you know, so for over emphasizing dialogue or for over emphasizing bridging and for over emphasizing understanding each other, those are important prerequisites.

Those are necessary, certainly, to help us have better conversations.

But ultimately, facts need to matter.

Better arguments need to matter.

uh People that are purposely dividing us uh using manipulative tools, we need to kind of push back on that, right?

So that's where when I talk about toxic polarization, information disorder, and conflict profiteers, as these three inter kind of twine challenges that we're facing in democracy,

there's a lot of efforts focused on each of those.

But if you just focus on one of those without recognizing the danger of the other two.

I think ultimately we fall short.

So that's where I'm trying to fashion deliberation and these kind of building tools as able to deal with all three of those in a way.

When we build a better environment, a better way of talking and build capacity for this, it helps us depolarize.

It helps us make distinctions between good information and bad information.

And it takes away a lot of the power from the conflict profiteers.

That their tactics are no longer as successful as they are.

So that I think long term is the heart of the argument for these deliberative practices, these democratic innovations, that it helps us take on those three challenges that we're

facing right now.

Can we say that when there is some toxic polarization that is maybe produced by newspapers or some other content that is seen by a lot of people, that there could be an intention to

do that?

Because uh you also say that the system where we live in...

uh

Actually, it's very polarizing because of the two-party system or other kind of reasons.

So I wonder if uh this polarization is produced in a consciously way or not.

No, I think, again, the idea of conflict profiteers, there's people that purposely uh create polarization.

That polarization helps.

They're profiting from the polarization.

eh And certainly at a political level, that's one of my biggest concerns about a two-party system, is it incentivizes polarization.

That's what works to win elections.

That's what works to get people fired up.

People ask me about Trump all the time and the safest way for me to respond to Trump is Trump's really good at a really bad game.

And certainly Trump is a polarizer, His rhetoric is kind of designed to divide us and kind of an us versus them and for me bring out the worst in human nature, right?

And the problem is pushing back on Trump with those same tools, I don't think long-term really works, right?

So that's where we're trying to change the game uh versus kind of play the game better in a sense.

So a lot of that polarization.

And I'll also say, not all polarization is bad.

We don't want everyone to think the same.

So that's why I use the term toxic polarization.

It's when polarization gets to a level that it undermines us and it brings out the worst in us and it leads to just simple assumptions.

If I assume the other side's evil, there's no reason for me to talk to them.

If I assume the other side has these hidden problematic motives, it cuts off all communication.

And in democracy, if half the population doesn't trust and dismisses the other side, there's no way a democracy can kind of function.

So clearly depolarization has to be a part of it and we're learning more and more about it.

um But we can't just focus on, let's just come together and assume the best because sometimes there are bad faith actors.

I don't think half the country is a bad faith actor, but there are certainly some people that are purposely trying to divide us for their own.

profit or ideological benefit.

Yeah, I'm thinking about how power works.

I mean, it's quite complex, but I'm thinking about the internal enemy strategy and outside the enemy strategy that makes the group more compact.

And so I think that this is also used a lot, I would say in every place of the world.

um And that, of course, creates, I would say, some

most of the time some toxic polarization and the people that are doing that of course they are doing it because they see an advantage.

At the same time also related to the question that I did before if they are conscious or unconscious if they are conscious that this way of doing

could actually lead to something very, very dangerous.

I'm thinking about nowadays we are not used to have, luckily, civil wars in Europe or in the Western world, but I'm thinking that in the past, I mean, Europe saw a lot of

violence.

I'm thinking also about religions, war.

Yeah, like when I when I talk about, you know, avoid triggering the worst of your nation to happen to the best.

One of the key aspects is this notion that, you know, humans are designed, you our brains are wired to be social, right?

We are social beings.

um Jonathan Haidt talks about this in terms of groupishness, right?

We're groupish.

The academic literature is, you know, uses the word tribal, right?

We're political tribes and so forth.

I think I have 10 books on my shelf that has the word tribe in it.

I tend to avoid the use, I think tribes are more complex term.

But that notion of humans, another book is called Making Monsters, like humans are one of the only species that like demonizes our own kind, right?

So it's this clear aspect of human nature that we tend to think naturally in terms of us and them.

And there's two sides of this coin.

Some of the worst things humans have ever done is because of this, right?

That we have an us and we define a them.

and we dehumanize them and we justify atrocities and we're still seeing this all over the world today.

But on the flip side, some of the best aspects of humans are that we're groupish.

We're not individualistic as a species.

We're in a group.

There's a power of us.

There's a way of connecting.

In some ways, we're one of the most cooperative species.

There's research I've been digging into that makes the argument that humans welcome the stranger more than any other species that exists.

So this becomes this question of what are we tapping into?

Are we tapping into the powerful negative side of that, the us versus them and the dehumanization, or are we tapping into the positive side of that, of bringing people

together?

And my shift from focusing on national politics the first few years of my career to shifting to local was really tied into that, right?

At the national politics level, we have a red team and a blue team and it's bringing out the worst in us, right?

And it incentivizes.

And for some people that's a conscious decision to do that.

And for a lot of other people, it's unconscious, right?

The media world that they're in tells them this narrative and they've fallen for that narrative.

So I don't think they're evil, I think they've been manipulated, So we're trying to get them out of that.

But if we switch to local, if someone's primary identity is, hey, I'm in Northern Colorado, right?

m And yes, there'll still be lot of distinctions, but at least the broad identity brings us together.

But we often get divided by politics, we get divided by race, we get divided by religion, we get divided by all these different things.

And all of those things have led to horrible things.

How do we reframe that and tap into that other part of our brain, which we're bringing people together as humans?

There's a natural empathy, which is a fascinating kind of upside and downside to that.

em So that's my long-term work is...

How do we understand the negative aspects of our brain that are constantly being triggered?

How do we design processes to avoid doing that?

But then the second half of my work, which is much more hopeful and those works are much more interesting to read for me, is a set of like, how do we avoid all this bad stuff?

How do we tap into the good stuff?

And there's a lot of good stuff with humans.

And again, that's where my optimism comes in.

It's harder to tap into the good stuff, right?

It's not as natural, but we know how to do it.

And the more you do it, the easier it is to do.

So how do we engage people, not as opponents, not as warriors in this good versus evil, us versus them battle?

How do we engage them as creative, collaborative problem solvers?

How do we switch?

I use Wicked Problems a lot in my work.

It's actually amazing.

I've been talking for an hour and I haven't brought it up yet.

But the heart of my work, I use Wicked Problems as a way of looking at issues.

that particularly assumes any complex issue has multiple underlying values that don't fit together.

And then in a pluralistic society, different people would prioritize those values differently, right?

But the heart of the wicked problems frame is instead of assuming problems are caused by wicked people, bad people that have bad values and bad motives, we put the wickedness in

the problem.

And that's a huge part of a shifting from

activating people as adversaries trying to vanquish evil, right, to how do we work together shoulder to shoulder to work these problems differently.

So that, I've had a lot of success, I think, of using that lens to help.

And I'm not saying that there's never wicked people.

Yes, there are some conflict buffeteers.

There are some people that are, know, but I think a vast majority of people are not wicked, right?

And then pragmatically, uh

I think very few people self-identify as wicked.

So we know from the research of you telling people that you think that they're evil or they're racist or whatever kind of term that you're using, that doesn't tend to work

because people don't self-identify like that.

And that just divides us more.

So the pragmatic effectiveness of framing an issue as a wicked problem can be very successful to help bring people together to see the issue differently, to open up space

for us to have very different conversations.

that think ultimately help us move the needle on these issues.

So I think if the person um doesn't identify himself as a racist or something else, using that term, that person feels attacked.

So that is the thing that should be avoided.

eh

thinking about the battle between facts and values and beliefs and so forth, um Arguments that challenge someone's own identity and challenge kind of their self-perception are

always going to fail, right?

And we see that with like the backfire effect, right?

If you're trying to convince someone that they're wrong and that they're a bad person, that's a very hard thing to do.

And what it often does is it just increases the polarization.

It's a backfire effect.

Right?

So that's where, how do we talk about these issues better?

And, you know, and I'm not saying everyone's opinions as good as everyone else's, part of the heart of deliberation is once we have that better conversation, you know, if someone

truly believes that they're right, these processes help us recognize that.

Right.

And that's where it's going to people are going to change their minds when they have genuine conversations with people that they trust.

And that's where they're going to have the aha moments.

And you see that with examples.

work on extreme listening with the icon, I think is her name is, or I forget the name of the musician, there's tons of TED Talks and YouTube about it, that get people to leave

white supremacist organizations.

You don't get someone to leave a white supremacist organization by attacking them for being racist.

You do it by asking them questions and talking to them, right?

And all of a they realize, like, wait a second, I'm wrong, right?

So it's not always just...

listening to us, know, there's a pragmatic aspect of this, of if you want to change someone's mind, you have to give them the respect and really listen to them.

Now, I'm not saying, you know, people, vulnerable audiences should try to have conversations with white supremacy.

It's very complex issue, right?

But it's the ultimate if we want to change.

The other thing I'll say, too, is, you know, if people truly believe the world is dominated by powerful people that are purposely oppressing us and holding people down,

I believe that they love the fact that we're all screaming at each other and facts don't matter.

It makes it easy for them to do that.

But as we transform our processes and start having better, better conversations, I think it makes it harder for those to kind of stay in power.

So that's the goal.

Ultimately, my work is pragmatic of how do we have these better conversations.

Some of the issues I take on are clearly wicked problems, reasonable people on all different sides.

And I think these processes help.

Sometimes our issues are, no, it's actually pretty clear that one side or a particular perspective is a much stronger perspective.

Both has better evidence, but also better kind of set of values.

Maybe it's clear one side is being manipulative and spreading misinformation or disinformation.

I still think sometimes these type of processes are the best to kind of reveal that, right?

But I mean, there is attention, we engage a lot with my students.

between kind of more of an activism perspective or a kind of deliberative civility, bring people together.

And it's not an either or choice, it's a spectrum.

um And depending on our project, there's different ways we kind of negotiate that.

I have a couple of questions if you have time.

In relation to how to have better conversation, you mentioned some book before, if you have any other book to advise and also some maybe an edox.

Yeah, I one of my favorite books for facilitation is Sam Kainer and he's got a few co-authors.

It's the facilitators guide to participatory decision-making.

We use that a lot with our training and actually, uh specifically talking about like AI and technology and so forth.

think that's an interesting, I'll try to kind of paint this picture pretty quickly, but the main model of how do we make good participatory decisions, decisions that involve the

people that it impacts.

You know, so for me, democracy, he talked about these three stages of diversion thinking.

Like first, we have to make sure we hear from everybody and we get past the kind of status quo and the assumptions and we hear lots of voices.

And then we have to go through what he calls the drone zone.

This is this tough conversation that we're actually really listening to each other and developing mutual understanding.

But then at some point we have to do convergent thinking.

We have to kind of come back together and make some tough distinctions and prioritize and decide how to move to action.

So we use that quite a bit.

both in our facilitation training and our process design, because each of those stages, the divergent thinking, the working through the grown zone and convergent thinking,

require a different way of talking, a different way of engaging.

And there's kind of pitfalls along the way.

So like if you're over-the-side dialogue, like I said, you have a lot of divergent thinking, but you never actually kind of work through things, right?

And you can kind of get stuck places.

So that book, we use that in lots of different kinds of contexts to kind of think about.

Okay, where are we in this conversation and what kind of techniques do we need to kind of move forward in a sense?

I'll also plug my colleague's book, Katie Knoblach and John Gastel.

Katie is the Associate Director of the CBD on faculty.

They have a book called Hope for Democracy, right?

We've talked a little bit about hope and optimism.

Focused primarily on some citizens assembly, the Oregon Initiative Review project of really digging into and seeing and it really kind of brings out

Hey, what are some of the things that we know work?

Again, that notion of we know what works to bring people together on these tough issues.

How do we build capacity to kind of do that?

And hopefully I'll have my book in about a year or so.

I'll send you an article that summarizes kind of what I do about imagining this robust, deliberative city.

I'm in the process right now of turning that essay into a book that hopefully will be out in the world soon.

Wonderful.

And the last question, if you have a message for the people that are maybe doing something similar to you in other parts of the world, or maybe they are working on technology to

create systems that could help facilitating.

So people that are exploring a new way for...

Yeah, so I work a lot with an organization called the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, ncdd.org.

That is kind more US-based, but certainly kind of the concepts.

Democracy Next is the kind of one international one I know that does a lot of work, a lot of interesting, uh producing a lot of things.

The Listen First Coalition, if you do listenfirst.org, has a bunch of organizations.

Again, most of these will be kind of national.

But yeah, there's a growing movement kind of across the world.

A lot of this, I think in some ways Canada and Australia and some things in the European Union are ahead of us on some of these things.

My work is US centric, but I think there's, they often call it public consultation in different places.

But I think we're seeing more and more innovation here of how do we do things differently?

We know screaming at each other doesn't work very well.

stop trying to play that game um and let's create some different games that we know are going to work a lot better for us.

Thank you, Martin.

Thank you a lot.

Yeah.

You can tell it's not hard getting me to talk about this stuff.

If you have anything else to add...

uh

One thing we didn't mention that I'll just kind of put out too, I work a lot with, like I said, cities and libraries and community foundations and school districts and for local

capacity.

For the last four years, I've worked quite a bit with local newsrooms.

So I wrote a paper on the National Civic Review about this dual crisis of local journalism and democracy and how they can bring them together.

So we've been working quite a bit with newsrooms to think about how

how can we equip local newsrooms with these deliberative processes, these deliberative skills to help us kind of change conversations.

One of my favorite articles is by Amanda Ripley, a journalist wrote an article called Complicating the Narrative.

And it was a journalist that got some conflict resolution training and realized like journalists have been doing conflict badly, right?

They've been leaning into the conflict.

They've been kind of highlighting the melodrama.

They've been saying, hey, you know, these are, because that's what's interesting.

That's what people want, right?

They want the attacks and the bad guys and so forth.

But what you got the conflict resolution training is like, what if journalists actually help us understand the conflict and dig deeper and help us reframe the conflict in more

useful ways, right?

And that led to something that they're called solutions journalism, which I think is probably nationwide or worldwide now.

So there's a lot of.

Like I said earlier, our brains are wired for polarization and our political system, our media system, uh and our tech platforms all tend to make that worse and take advantage of

that.

Well, in all three of those now, so we're working a lot on democratic innovations and political innovations to make better political systems.

The deliberative journalism that I'm working on and solutions journalism are trying to figure out better ways of doing journalism that do that.

And then some of these new tech platforms.

uh Flipside Forum is one I played with a little bit.

I know in Northeastern United States there's a front porch forum.

So there's new and then a lot of these AI sway is one of the AI tools that I learned at the Northwestern.

Simon Cullen's work on kind of creating these tech platforms or AI that are helping us come together.

So that's where leaning on those new technologies, those new ways of thinking that I think are informed by our brains, but are designed to, as I've said several times.

not trigger the bad stuff and actually get into the good stuff so we can function better.

Yeah, let's hope that all this platform works so we have more facilitator and better conversation.

Thank you a lot again.