Philip Lindsay on Democracy & Innovation

Philip Lindsay is the Democracy Innovations Program Manager at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. At the Hannah Arendt Center, Lindsay leads the Democracy Innovation Hub, where he conducts workshops for public servants and educators. He has been involved in initiatives like citizens’ assemblies, which aim to foster collaborative democracy by involving everyday people in governance through random selection and deliberation.

RESOURCES & LINKS MENTIONED:

More in Common A non partisan research groups studying drivers of polarization, and producing reports that build social cohesion.

Braver Angels An organization that brings conservatives and liberals together for structured conversations.

Ground News A news service that shows how left, center, and right media cover different stories.

Alright, here we are. Philip, thank you so much for accepting my invitation. So I don't really know this, but I start all of these conversations with the same question, which I borrowed from a friend of mine. She teaches oral history down the street. And I stole it because it's a beautiful question, but it's really big, so I over explain it. So before I ask it, I want you to know that you're in total control, and you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from?

That feels like a very easy question to me. It's where I'm currently visiting - 10th and Carpenter in Philadelphia. I grew up in what I think is one of the most dynamic, rich neighborhoods in Philadelphia and in the United States. And I mean, rich in the sense of not monetarily, though it's not a poor neighborhood. The Italians in South Philly called it the longest living or still open-air market in the country. So you can still go six days a week. And most of the day, people are selling fruits and veggies and all kinds of foods outside under, you know, awnings. You've seen Rocky, it's where he's running through the time market and the barrels are on fire.

So I grew up a block away from that. And there's just a rich history, both connected to the market and various waves of immigration. And we're 15 blocks south of Independence Hall where the Constitution was written. And that's where I grew up. And it's a dense urban area that you can, you know, is a colonial America where you can walk anywhere. And that's where I grew up. And that influenced the social and political and economic dynamics of this neighborhood has greatly shaped me and exposed me to all kinds of things.

What does it mean to be from Philly when you're out in the world? Or what does it mean to you?

I think those connotations, like anything, it's, you know, one defines that word, the city, but the connotations of Philly are usually that it's working class and a little more humble. You know, it's always a comparison to a place like New York. But, you know, Philly usually doesn't, you don't think of glitzy, you don't think of, it's a little more rough around the edges.

And, but yeah, what does it mean to be from Philly? I don't think in general there's any defined meaning, but for me it's relating to the market, honestly. The market is that much of an influence and just a place of dynamism in exchange. Obviously, there's the history of American democracy that can be traced back to Philly.

And I would say, you know, I would say a few things. There's a Quaker tradition that I was exposed at an early age that's part of the state's history. You know, it's, of course, a majority black city and a big sports city.

But I mean, one thing that I always find interesting I tell people about Philly is that the city was losing population. I mean, this is true for many industrial centers in the United States, but after World War Two, every census showed population decline. So Philly still has less people than it did in 1950.

There were over two million people at that time. And now it's been creeping back up since the 2010 census. That was the first census since World War Two when the population actually increased. And it's still 1.6 something, I believe. So you've got a ton of housing stock, which means you have a ton of space. You've got a lot of community gardens. They get lots. You've just got more space. And that has kept prices down.

Again, a little more rough around the edges. But it's allowed for, you know, you still have a thriving art and cultural community that can afford to live here and experiment and do fun, do interesting community oriented stuff.

Do you have a memory of what you wanted to be as a kid, like what you wanted to be when you grew up?

Yes, I was obsessed with baseball until I was like 12 years old and absolutely just wanted to play major league baseball. I also wanted to own my own pizza place. Again, I kind of owed to the market, like the local pizza place that I would go to. And I remember telling my sister, like, I'm going to own a pizza place. And she just looked at me and she was like, you're better than that. Like she was so elitist about it. She was so elitist about it. But that's, yeah, pizza and baseball, essentially.

What was the magic of the market? What's the story?

Oh, you've got to come down and see it. It's still magic. It's it's and it's become more dynamic. I mean, you have it originates, you know, I'm not an expert on the history of the market, but you've got in the late 1800s, you've got the Italian population, you've got a Jewish population. I think you've got an Albanian population.

You've got a kind of maybe not Albanian. You've got a mixture of all immigrants, but it's more dominated. It wasn't always Italian. It's called the Italian market. It used to be called the Italian market. It was never always Italian, but it was a predominantly Italian neighborhood.

And so it was an open market modeled on, I guess, what was what was the old, you know, the 18th, 19th century open air markets. And, you know, just the efficiency of getting all the food to one place and having folks come to one place like before we had supermarkets, XYZ.

And, you know, this is like three story buildings down one long street, nine street.

So, I mean, it started off mostly Italian. And then of course, the 20th century has had successive waves of different immigrants who tend to bring their foodways, the Vietnamese, the Mexican, the Central Americans who have reinvigorated the market with their fresh culinary traditions, their small businesses, you know, their entrepreneurial spirit. And you've got that.

And then you've got the fact that it's just a place where people outside in the open talking to each other, bumping into each other. Even in the winter, they have a big fire, the big barrels that keep the outdoor market warm with these big barrels, metal barrels that they fill with wood. And so, I mean, it's just intimate and special and cozy and rough and in.

Yeah, if you watch, there's a hilarious Always Sunny and Philly episode where they go to Italian markets to barter. And that's a that's a. Yeah. So it's just dense and alive. You know, it's not no screens, no, you know, no electronics. So you're outside and asking people how much stuff costs. And it's still like that. So it's special.

Tell me a little bit about - I know you're visiting you’re back home for the holidays. But tell me a little bit about your work or what you're up to, where you're working and what your role is.

So I work at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College. And my role for the past several years has been both on the communication side of the center, helping with our annual conferences that we put on that people should check out that are about different political and social themes every year. Always bring a mixture of interesting journalists and local activists and international experts and authors and poets there.

And that's open to the public. But since I started the Arendt Center, I've really been passionate about Citizens Assemblies, which is how I first heard about the Arendt Center. The Arendt Center put on one of the first academic or more academic conferences about Citizens Assemblies three years ago.

And I registered to attend and then became just very fascinated by this concept of bringing everyday people together across party lines and from a more citizen power perspective to make political decisions and make judgments about the world together. And I came to that conference three and a half years ago and ever since I've been working on this concept of Citizens Assemblies trying to reach out to folks who know way more about the topic than I do, learn from them, visit processes that are happening in other places, connect with politicians who are interested in running assemblies, connect with activists who are interested in convening them.

And so what we do at the Democracy Innovation Hub is we convene and connect with the various different folks who are facilitating assemblies, practitioner organizations, elected officials and public servants who are interested in deepening public participation in political decisions in their localities or at the state level, at the national level, and trying to catalyze processes of high quality in places like New York State, but also generally on the East Coast in our general vicinity. So I run that, I'm the program manager of the Democracy Innovation Hub.

And what was your attraction? What were you up to at the time of the Citizen Assembly, that event was on your radar and you were so excited about it?

I mean, climate and energy, common sense in terms of making sense of the world together in a world of AI and competing facts or, you know, the alternative facts as they've often called. It seems to me before I learned about assemblies that democracy itself couldn't move forward with just two major parties that sort of were increasingly living in different worlds. And I didn't see a path forward in terms of an institution that could create sustainable involvement of everyday people. I mean, I specifically have worked on campaigns before and I've been in certain moments of my life burnt out from a campaign, whether it's electoral or another campaign's winner-take-all or black or white outcome where you either win or you lose. And I think, essentially, if you're trying to get young people involved in democracy, simply having them fight for their candidate or fight for their cause can lead to a lot of false binaries between like, if you lose this campaign, there's nothing more for you to do. Whereas if you have a different institution that is about bringing people together and having them experience each other's perspectives and then come up with solutions together, you can have a different, you can kind of disrupt that sort of burnout culture and campaign culture, which is all about, you know, we will win. We will make it to the promised land if we just pass our bill. The reality is like, no matter who passes their bill, there's like, politics doesn't end, right? There's never an end to that and it's more sustainable.

When I found out about Citizen Assemblies, I was fascinated, first of all, by this concept that random selection was an alternative form of, or was the original form of democratic process, which just isn't plot. Like, I just didn't know about that. Yeah.

Yeah, I want to, I want to spend time peeling the two things apart because they like the two. I mean, it's a horrible word, but these paradigms are right that the way that we do things now is that the winner takes all zero sum, the way you participate is this competitive, you just sort of fight for yours. And if you win, you win, if you don't, you lose. And we, I think there's, you know, I talked to people around town, that's, that's democratic, that's democracy, so you can't really get it. And so it's hard sometimes to communicate, what's the benefit of doing it a different way? Deliberation has benefits that make it very different, right? Because, and I'm just kidding, you were just speaking to it, what does, why do something in a deliberative way when you put in this winner takes all democratic way? Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I think there's a couple ways to think about it. One is certain this, I mean, if you would just think about it from a chessboard sort of like zero sum game, even if even if you're thinking about what does it mean to build a bigger coalition, one can argue, thinking through and deliberating under amongst the merit, the various folks that make up your coalition or the various folks who you see on your side, right, that that hasn't added added added value, even if, even if you're within the winner take all mindset. But I think beyond that, so yeah, so I, the first point I want to kind of dig a double click on at once, which is, you know, groups that cooperate better can compete better against other groups, right?

So if you've got bad dysfunctional team dynamics, you're not going to compete against other groups better. So is that and then the second point would be, if you can create an institution that actually breaks up some of the cognitive biases and just like, I'm always, I'm very interested in, well, I'll give a very specific example. There's an organization called ground news that I recommend everybody check out, which provides you pretty direct information about your own cognitive biases by giving you a perspective on how often an issue is reported in the left on the left on the right and in the center.

So it will give you a headline about some topic, you know, wild files in California or XYZ, the Supreme Court just did this, right? And then it will say like the percentage of news outlets reporting on this from the left versus the center versus on the right. And it will immediately show you whether you're maybe on the right and you're blind spot because you had not even heard this headline, right?

There's an aspect to the deliberative institution that tries to draw upon the cognitive and viewpoint diversity of a community. And I think the added value of that type of institution on this second point, this idea of, hey, a lot of times we're wrong and we don't know we're wrong. And most of the time we're wrong. I think that that's the reality is that the sort of cognitive biases that we all have about the way the world works. And especially they've done a lot of research.

There's a group called More In Common that has done a lot of research on the ways we view the other side and what we think they think about the world. And I'm often impressed by the way members of my family or friends of mine just don't really interact with people so often who at least, you know, in person, maybe they interact with people on TV or they watch that. They just don't actually understand the internal worlds of other people.

And they're not, they're not incentivized to try to understand those internal worlds. So there's actually just a reality in which most of the time everybody can't see the whole picture. And so I'm really curious about these deliberative institutions, citizen assemblies included, as places where you start to see the whole picture in one room.

And it's not a silver bullet, but you start to see what it would look like if people's political imagination, their cognitive biases were broken down, even if for a couple weekends.

How do you explain what a citizen assembly is to people? Where do you start, you know, when you're in a cocktail party conversation? What's the best way you found to help people understand what the citizen assembly is and why it seems so important?

Yeah, I think I try to be more intuitive about this in terms of who I'm speaking to. For instance, some people liken the assembly model to a jury, right? And then one event I was at recently I asked, you know, I asked the room if anyone had been on a jury before, right? And then you're going to get certain people who have had specific relationships with a jury and good or bad.

So sometimes I bring up the jury, but actually more often I think about, I talk about it as like a different way of doing democracy. I mean, I've changed the way I talk about this depending at different times. But I think, you know, the ways that our field has increasingly communicated about this and that I think is useful is like you talk about two things, you just simplify it, right? There's two things.

It's like who's in a room and what they're doing in the room. And the who's in a room is different from other processes because it uses this civic lottery, which means everyone has an equal chance of being selected. And that the group in the first part who's in the room, the group in the room is going to be as diverse as possible from a cognitive point of view, from a geographic point of view, from an ethnic point of view.

And those questions are political, right? So one, Who's in the room? Civic lottery. Two, What they're doing in the room, we're not talking about a couple hours, we're talking about multiple weekends. So like the amount of time.

Most people, when you talk to them about this, they think about some process they were at that lasted a couple of hours. Because most of us have not had the chance to serve as an elected representative or in a deliberative body. Most people are not on a committee, most people are not on a some sort of governing body.

They don't have the chance to experience governance. So the second part is you're spending a lot of time with these other people, really getting to know them, learning about an issue and deliberating, which means thinking through the pros and cons of taking different decision making. So it's really about responsibility.

So I try to break down just those two things, like who's in the room and how long, and then if there's a longer conversation, go into the political dynamics. But I think it so depends on who you're talking to, right? Like if someone has no, I mean, America is such an apolitical culture that a lot of people have no interaction with the government. Yeah, yeah, the expectations of what it might be like.

I mean, I'll say that word and they just assume, like you say, just it's like a town hall, just another word for a town hall or something. Right. How would you break that? Can you be explicit about what, how does it work? To the degree, like you've talked about it a little bit, you know what I mean? That they're meeting over multiple weekends. What's happening in that room? And to the degree that you're familiar with the process that the members of the Assembly go through. Like that's another part. I think nobody really gets the idea that it's facilitated. They just sort of think the facilitation feels really powerful and it's sort of invisible. I think I know when I talk to people about it, just think, oh wait, you're putting a bunch of people in a room and they're just going to argue the way that everybody argues all the time. But yeah, this is a really structured space.

Exactly. So the space is a good point. So I try to, and this is actually one thing I've been relying on more and more if I'm not, if I don't have access to a video or I can't show them a case study. It's, you know, think of a large room that can hold between 50 and 100 people that you can move between a large group discussion, plenary discussion, and small table discussion without changing rooms. And there's a front area for testimony stakeholders to come up to the front, be on stage or on the floor, and present from different perspectives about a specific topic. Right.

So let's say we're thinking about some land use change to the city, right? Or some big investment decision that needs to be made around a new wastewater facility. Okay. Should we go in this direction or that direction with the investment? Folks from all sides of the issue, the private businesses involved, the local urban planners that know a ton about this topic, outside experts are presenting, they're chosen by a group that's convening the assembly to present to this larger citizen body.

And again, we're talking anywhere between 36 and a couple hundred people, but let's imagine a group of about 75 in a room. That group of 75 is sitting at small tables of six to 10 people at every small table, and every small table has a facilitator. So you're learning about the issue, and then you're discussing it in your small groups.

And you can rotate from table to table, but importantly, this facilitator at each table is ensuring that people are speaking the same amount of time, that people who are staying quiet are encouraged to speak up, right? So the structure is unlike most public meetings, which most of us are accustomed to. And what is the role? I mean, I remember my experience was at the summer workshop, where I feel like I just feel so grateful I was there to hear all these practitioners talk about it. And I'll share a link in the interview to the Wind Citizens' Assembly, hearing people talk about their experience in Ireland, making gay marriage and abortion legal.

I was also struck by how they talked about it. Somebody described it as it's not public opinion, it's public judgment. Because all those members of the Assembly are being educated, they're really being made experts in a way on an issue, and given the responsibility of sort of talking it out and coming to consensus. I guess my question is, why is it showing up now? Like there's this thing called the deliberative wave. What do you think is driving its popularity? Why are people like me excited by what the Citizen Assembly offers? Do you have an idea?

I mean, one of my favorite songs, the lyrics is, there's always a good solution on the verge of some revolution. So I think systemic breakdown of the democratic republics or the democracies around the world is sort of the blockage that happens when you have a systems design that doesn't include people and make them responsible for

their own destiny. And instead has a system of policy, that's the politician's job, that's the lawyer's job, that's the expert's job.

And voting is something that we should be proud of, we should conserve, we should defend the right to vote. But if the system is about me voting so that someone else can take care of the trash always, I think that system will tend towards dissolution in some way. You need a way of the system reproducing itself in terms of self-governance.

And we're talking about self-government, and we don't have some institution, whether it's educational institution or deliberative institution, that is bringing people into the world. And Hannah Arendt, I mean, if you listen to Roger's podcast on Hannah Arendt, the recent ones, he's talking about education and Hannah Arendt's theory of education. And she talks about education as bringing the new people into the world and leading them into the, giving them the space to create the new world.

If voting is about delegating responsibility, and increasingly it's not even about that, it's negative partisanship, it's sort of like, I just don't want those guys in power, as it increasingly just becomes a big middle finger to the system. And if that's the main way the majority of people interact with the system, the system will break down and it will trend towards, actually, maybe we should just have one guy or one lady leading the whole thing. It tends to be one guy, I guess.

And if we're committed to a society without a boss, then we need an institution that brings people into the habit of governing a public judgment that you said. So I think the reason why we're all so fascinated by this is because it offers a different type of institution. One, that if you're sick of everybody just trying to tear down stuff and raise the middle finger at those things and blame some other, something else, this actually offers us a moment to say, what if we built this together? What if we actually built a different system of public participation together? It gives us a shared project to also work on, which is also really compelling.

One more thing, actually, on that. The two-party system is so divisive at this point that so many people are exhausted by that process. They're exhausted by - I mean, if you watch debates, it's a joke. It's not impressive. It's not compelling.

And I think it was, I'm going to get his name right. Is it Van Reybrouck? Is that the author of Against Elections? Yeah. At the beginning, he said, you know, I'm a marketing guy. So I'm, you know, he was talking in my language. I had been bored by this kind of language for years. He's like, we've been innovating or democratizing everything for like a decade, right? Except democracy. And that really calls attention to the fact that all that's really asked of us most of the time is, like you say, just to flip a switch. And so we're caught in this outrage machine. And my attraction to it was just feeling like, you know, that I had watched Hudson in my small town. We just didn't know how to have a conversation with each other. And we didn't really trust each other that much. And it just felt like nobody was in the same conversation ever. And so it seemed like this powerful way of helping us have a conversation with each other. And I'm curious about the mechanics a little bit. You pointed at the sortition, right? Like the lottery system. What is the significance of sortition? I mean, you talk about history, because that's the other thing people don't really quite get. Like it's facilitated over a long period of time. And then what is the significance of a randomly selected representative group? Why is that important?

Well, I mentioned cognitive diversity. You know, a lot of people have different definitions of diversity, but it's rare that you can get a group of people in the room that come from very different backgrounds, but also very different political or social approaches to a problem, right? We're so, we're increasingly in our own bubbles from an informational standpoint.

We have our own streams, our own feeds. We are segregated in terms of what schools we went to, public or private, what part of the city we grew up in. Those dividing lines have increasingly made it hard for us to even just make sense of, we trust each other a lot less.

And this is a really dangerous tipping point, when you get to the point where you can't even trust other people. That's when the idea of a democracy really breaks down and people will really say, you know what, I would trust just having a boss. We just need a strong man, because I don't trust the majority of people.

And if we're in that place, we desperately need to get together in public and have facilitated conversations, because at that point, people can exploit that situation and do a lot of harm. And so when you think through, if you think through, how do you get a bunch of people in the room who disagree together? Well, there's a couple of aspects of this. You either have a group of folks who are talking to each other and can get those different people in the room, right? Like, if you think of the way peace treaties are signed or the ways that gang members get together to work something out.

It's like there's got to be a couple of people on the inside on both sides that are trusted by both sides that you can get those groups in, right? But even if you have those trusted individuals, you've got to have some method of selecting the rest of the group in a way that's fair. And one of the simplest ways is by a specific lottery, in the sense of if you're trying to build trust and trying to have a fair transparent process that says this was not corruption. And this

goes back, you mentioned David Raybrook book, he mentions the history of the use of sortition as a tool of anti-corruption.

Essentially, it's the kind of, if you think about the intuitive way we draw sticks, if we're on a, you know, who's going to go collect firewood or who's going to do XYZ or who's going to, you know, the lottery sort of like. We're familiar with a basic egalitarian way to select for a specific position. The important thing here is that we're not like randomly selecting the president, right? Like we're using this as an intentional tool to create what you mentioned was a demographically representative sample of the larger community.

And so the importance there is if you're asking the question, how can we talk to each other across these divided lines? How can we get people in a room who are normally not in a room together? I think it's a combination of these two things. One, finding the trusted messengers that can speak across the lines, like that we need, right? For instance, the facilitators. You can get this civically, you can get a randomly selected group in a room together.

If you don't have facilitators that really can speak plain language across these different communities, you're going to hit the same wall, right? So the civic lottery is not a silver bullet. You need groups of facilitators and cadres of people that are committed to this kind of institution to hold up the legitimacy of a process like this. And anyway, I hope I'm not going off too often in that direction.

Yeah, so I would think of any trusted messengers, people that are willing to – often the people that can talk across these divides are people who have those divides within their own families. Yeah. No, I was completely with you, and I guess I was thinking about – oh, good Lord, I just lost my train of thought.

Oh, that – oh, well, I always love Peter McLeod. He's talked about how citizen assemblies are the manufacturer of democratic integrity, that there's something trustworthy about them, and that because people are coming together, it's more trustworthy. You're actually building trust and integrity in a process by making it in the way. There's this combative winner-takes-all way of making decisions, right? Which just kicks up so much dust and conflict and division and, like you say, like disappointment. I mean, if you lose and your heart and your crest fall, what are you going to do after that? It's just – it's not resource efficient, but this is sort of regenerative in a way. It's sort of – you've used the word sustainable. So I feel like we've covered on sortition, right, like that that's connected to – and we've covered on facilitation that it happens over time and that it's deliberative.

I'm curious about the types of questions. You know, we're sort of – this isn't just bringing people together to get along, you know what I mean? They're there to come to consensus and particularly good, it seems to me, what I've heard for very, very difficult, intractable problems or questions. How do you talk about the kinds of things one can address in the citizen assembly? And I also wonder how it is framed? You know what I mean? It's not really operating in terms of content in the ways that other things do.

Yeah, so I was really excited and privileged to have gone to the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the British Columbia Citizens' Assembly that Peter was involved in. And that assembly was on electoral reform and thinking through the future of the way that British Columbia did its elections, right? First pass the post, winner takes all, proportional representation. They basically had 100 everyday people 20 years ago think through the future of the electoral system.

So a lot of times when we talk about citizens, I'm just like, oh, are we going to do it on a specific topic? What's the specific thematic topic? And certainly like in New York City, for instance, that's what we're doing with our working group in New York. We're trying to figure out what are the right topics for this. But I do think that we would be missing the best opportunities if we just focused on the sort of the framing of specific issues that are like one time decisions. We'd be missing the bigger promise of this as an institution. And that's where I think it's funny. People point to the BC assembly still. It is part of what created this deliberative wave. And Peter tells this story really well. He was there and he's been leading the charge in Canada ever since. That assembly produced recommendations that went to a referendum. And I think this combination of an assembly about some big issue combined with a referendum is really fascinating and points to a different type of institution in terms of how to bring forward the public will when the people are thinking together. I don't know if you've checked out Fishkin's

book from Stanford Democracy when the people are thinking that's really a good resource here.

But constitutionally to pass the referendum you needed above 60 or to specifically change the process. But people are still talking about that assembly 20 years later and it created a wave of interest because it was such a big structural question at the heart of the future of British Columbia democracy. And I think the political awakening of people's political imagination around that as a different type of institution or decision making mechanism.

That's the bigger question. It's not. Hey, is there a specific like to build or not to build a dam in this area that we should find. Like, I think that would be great if we can. There are issues that are right for that. But I think there are so many kinds of structural questions about the future of American democracy that we should be thinking a lot bigger and we should be more ambitious because we don't have the time to sit around and wait if we're like you know. So that's my my my desires that we start to think about this as an educating folks about to awaken folks political imagination around the possibility. I want to hear more about that because I feel like I learned that I walked away from that summer workshop with that distinction that it's very easy to see this as just sort of an engagement tool that you can kind of pull out of your toolkit every once in a while and apply to a problem. But there's a very different way you use the word institution.

What examples, what is the argument to make this a permanent form in the marketing space? If you're a company and you've got a service or a product out there, you have to create new ways for people to interact with you. There's no new forms of participation other than I mean this deliberative democracy, right? It's a new way of interacting with our government. It's a new behavior in a way. Yes. Or am I overstating the case?

No, I think it definitely is a different way of interacting.

If I'm 18 years old and I've just become able to vote and exactly it's let's say it's 2035 and I turned 18 and my community has an assembly that happens every year as part of the it's just the pattern of civic participation in terms of how it governs. I'm going to have a wildly different idea of who I am in my community and what my relationship and responsibility is with everything else around. At the moment, all that's expected of me is to show up every couple of years and tick a box and get into arguments with people pretty much.

Well, you answered the question better than I could. That's exactly the way, when we had a class about this at Bard, I asked them that the framing question is like what kind of system do you get when your primary method of engagement is by, you know, ticking a box every couple of years versus what would it look like if you as a young person were expected to serve on an assembly about a specific topic. And that you would actually be, you know, why not even start that in schools? And I think if we think about the way our student government works and we can imagine a system in which instead of learning about government, you were actually required to serve on a student council as part of your graduation requirements. And you maybe it was randomly selected, maybe it was you got to choose the year XYZ, but the concept of rotation and governing to be governed. And I mean, it would break down even this concept of politician and political class that we have. SoI liked exactly the way you framed it.

Oh, and I still feel like I maybe heard an argument coming back to me from deep in my own imagination that well, nobody wants to serve on this. Nobody wants to do this anymore. But people don't participate anyway. But I feel like we somehow got into this place of apathy by not giving any, not investing any faith in anybody to begin with. You know what I mean?

So we need institutions that that and systems that maintain that the commons that keep us, you know, keep us in contact with each other that break our cognitive bubbles that that are not like we're not mandating you become friends with people on the opposite side of the aisle. But it's also I mean, the way I think it's a lot less boring of a system if we were to have people rotating in and out of these assemblies. I think you'd get a lot more creativity.

You'd get more. I think you'd get more creativity in companies. You'd get more creativity in social settings. You'd get more interesting art theater. I mean, I think there's something there that's way beyond just sort of governance. This is about one of the things I become fascinated with that it would be silly if I didn't share this is the original reforms.

You know, I don't think we should idealize what ancient Greece was or where these practices of random selection come from. But we are living in such a tribal society right now in terms of our politics and the original reforms that instituted the random selection in ancient Greece were deliberately attempting to break up the old tribes that were based on class and privilege. And I've been fascinated with this idea of thinking about the mixing together that assemblies provide and how cool and how a lot of my favorite other experiences in life have come when I have been with a group of people that are very different from me doing some task that we're working on together.

And so whether it's in its partition and random selection for an assemblies or things things like the idea of of national service around volunteer, you know, volunteering or there's many ways to think about this this intentional mixing as something that just brings a vitality and a newness and an inspiration and surprises to life, right? And we're increasingly living in this life. This life is just increasingly, you know, you know, shut yourself in and watch TV and we need to give young people something that's way more exciting than that. Yeah, that, you know, this it's not just citizens assemblies, but it is, it is getting outside in nature with people who you normally don't, you know, meet with them. And some of that can be bottom up and some of it needs to be experimented with, you know, across organizations and now I'm going off on another tangent here but

Oh, no, no, it's good. I'm right there with you. I mean, again, I mean, I just feel again, I mean, I was cool. But I remember him talking about how I mean, you're just diagnosing the thing that we're all talking about, that we kind of everything our world is so antisocial. You know what I mean? Like that was so many of the things that so much of how we're organized today keeps us apart. And if we can recognize that that's the issue, then we need to. I've never heard this word before, but we need to develop pro social behaviors. So if we're not actively creating pro social behaviors to address antisocial problems, then what are we doing? Right. And I thought that was so powerful because this really is a new way for people to interact with each other and to trust each other, which is so promising. So I don't know if there's anything else that you want to address. I'm so grateful for the work that you're doing. I think it's so awesome. And I'm so excited to just be sharing these ideas with people. So thank you so much.

Yeah, absolutely. I would like to share with people these two resources that I think are really powerful. One is ground news that people should, you know, catch their own kind of political and news newsfeed bias with ground news. And the other is Brave Angels. Brave Angels is an organization trying to get people in the room across the red, blue political divide. And I've been really inspired by those two models of trying to get people exposed to folks who they're not normally not listening to or in the same rooms with.

Yeah. Can you tell me a story about Brave Angels? I've been following them on Instagram for a long time. I haven't done anything to sort of implement it in my community, but it's really

beautiful. And I admire what they're doing.

And so the way we interact with politics is usually just through voting, but we're not socially engaged in one of the parties or our local system of governance. And why I'm starting here is that I went to Brave Angels. So Brave Angels is an organization that brings people together across the red, blue, conservative, liberal, generally political divide.

And any of their events has to be co-chaired by one person who leans red, one person who leans blue. And I went to their convention out in Kenosha, Wisconsin, this summer. And I was just so impressed with the way they organized themselves and the fluidity, the integrity, the vitality and the social spirit of this massive gathering.

Hundreds, if not over a thousand people meeting over multiple days to think about how to grow the organization, which is chapter based and has local chapters around the country and is a membership organization. And it felt like an anti-political political party in some ways. And it was such a dynamic space with some I mean, there were socialists in the room.

There were MAGA hat wearing folks in the room. There were environmentalists. There were, you know, just such a politically diverse space that my head was exploding.

And it was so fascinating. I said, even just the kind of experience of being in the room with this many different types of people who believe so many different things. And seeing them run workshops together, think about new things together for my youth, you know, a young Braver Angels group, which was hilarious.

Like the Braver Angels youth group was running this facilitated sort of mock debate. And it was one of the funniest things I've been at. And so to just be in a space where instead of there was so much, there was so dynamic and you didn't know what was going to happen next.

And I think that group is going to rapidly grow as people need as people search out alternatives. So that's why I share that and ground news as two resources. And I'm sure there's a Braver Angels group somewhere in the Hudson Valley that folks can reach out to.

Yeah, I'll share links to all the stuff that you share. Thank you so much.

My pleasure.

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