Peter MacLeod on Democracy & Deliberation

Peter MacLeod is the founder and principal of MASSLBP, and a pioneer in the practice of deliberative democracy. Under his leadership, MASS has completed more than 200 major policy projects for governments and public agencies across Canada, pioneering the use of Civic Lotteries and Citizen Reference Panels and earning international recognition.

They have a wonderful set of Nine Ideas. Here is a talk of his “Citizen Assemblies: Democracy’s Second Act” at Bard’s Hannah Arendt Center for Humanities in 2022.

All right. Well, Peter, thank you so much for accepting my invitation.

Very nice to be able to join you, Peter. 

So I start all the conversations I have with the same question, which I borrow from a friend of mine. She's an oral historian, right? So she helps people tell their story.  And it's a beautiful question, which is why I use it, but it's a big question, which is why I over explain it the way that I am now. So before I ask it, you can answer or not answer any way that you want to. And the question is, where do you come from? 

I thought you were going to ask maybe Laurie Anderson's equally momentous question, which she she famously she said, are things getting better or are things getting worse? And maybe that's the question we all need to be asking ourselves. But very basically, you know, I grew up in a town that's about 100 kilometers southwest of Toronto here in Canada. Cambridge, Ontario. 

Both my parents were public school teachers. And I, you know, I always had a bit of an interest in politics, but I got a very powerful inoculation against partisan politics from a fairly tender age. And it's because here in Canada, each of our provinces have legislatures, much like your states do. 

And we invite kids to come and deliver notes and cups of water to the politicians. They're called pages. And I'm sure some of your legislatures have a program. Well, I went there when I was in grade seven. And what it did for me was pretty basic. It showed me that nobody had a monopoly on the truth and that there were interesting things to be found on all sides. 

It was difficult to have to sit there in the legislature day after day, week after week, month after month, listening to the debate and come away thinking, oh, yeah, team red, they got it. No, no, team blue. Yeah, totally.  100 percent. So everything I've been working on since then has really been a product, I think, of two forms of experiences. One, a kind of innate, I guess, just inculcated respect and belief in the power of public institutions like public education and a kind of skepticism about excessive partisanship and the monopoly that any politician has on the truth. 

Yeah. What was going on in that moment? I mean, I love the call out to excessive partisanship, of course. But what was it about about there? What did you learn there ? 

It was a very formative age. Right. You know, you're you're probably 13, 14 years old, I guess. 

And, you know, at the time we had what was called the NDP government was Ontario's first NDP, which is the new Democratic Party and a fairly young premier named named Bob Ray, who's gone on to have a pretty illustrious career in Canadian politics. You know, a sea change had sort of happened and, you know, there was a sense of the province changing its ways moving forward. And I mean, my own personal politics are probably sympathetic to what the NDP was doing. 

But, you know, at the end of the day, you could see when a minister kind of flubbed a question or just, you know, didn't answer it at all. You could hear when an opposition member was just grandstanding. You know, often politicians will say, oh, I just wish people would would come down and see what we do. 

All right. Well, you know, to actually see what they do for 45 minutes is one thing to see what they do again, days and days, weeks and weeks. You know, it did a good job, I guess, removing some of the mystique. 

Yeah. 

And I'd have to fast forward another decade before the next real layer of all of that would get stripped away. 

Oh, well, I want to stay in childhood. I always ask, what did you want to be when you grew up? What did young Peter dream of being as an adult? 

Wow. You know, I'd like to say I wanted to be something super cool, you know, like fighter pilot or firefighter. You know, I was a pretty bookish and kind of nerdy kid. 

And, you know, one of the things that my dad, who is an English teacher, he and I managed to, I guess, connect around was that every Sunday, he would drive into town because we lived just outside and forested area. We would drive into town to J&B variety and he would buy the Sunday New York Times. And I don't know, it was just like back in the 80s, like it was a massive. 

Yeah, it was a full day commitment. And, you know, this this gave me kind of access into a bigger world because, you know, there wasn't anything like this going on in Cambridge. There wasn't a whole lot of it even maybe going on in Toronto.  And suddenly, you know, you were seeing all the kind of fashion and culture and the arts and business. There's a long way around. I guess I'm hedging a little bit because I thought from a young age, that'd be really cool to be a consultant of some kind. 

And it's because really the New York Times, you'd read the business pages or you'd read, you know, current affairs. And there would always be these people. It was kind of a part of the zeitgeist, I guess, in the 80s and 90s, the rise of management consultants. 

They seem to be able to get their hands into everything. And somebody who's always really just been interested in everything. I'm much more Fox than Hedgehog. I like to learn lots of different things, although obviously the work I've done at Mass for now a very long time has been to advance a singular objective. So make of it what you will. But no, I thought having a kind of varied career where I could try and be helpful in a lot of different contexts. 

This is a terrible, terrible answer for a kid. For a kid to say, well, I guess the only redeeming thing is I while I'm a consultant today, I've created this organization Mass. I've never become like a bona fide, you know, corporate management consultant. 

Well, you are not alone. My freshman college roommate, whose name was also Peter, I remember him very explicitly saying that he sort of dreamed of growing up to be the kind of consultant that was quoted in international papers. 

Wow. That was like never aspire to that. I just thought it seemed like a versatile way to get mixed up in a bunch of things.  And it was kind of funny, you know, to fast forward a little bit, you know, I ended up being really fortunate. I got into student journalism in high school and then in university a little bit. I had the chance to go to Fast Company magazine in some of its earliest days. 

And, you know, that was such a springboard because, you know, from Fast Company showing up there as an intern, then getting this funny gig of being able to interview some of the top American B school deans. I then, you know, read about this amazing organization in the UK called Demos. And Demos is one of the vanguard think tanks around Tony Blair in the early days of New Labour.  And so I catapulted myself from Canada over to there. And I got a real immersion in a particular way of thinking about public services and government. And that was enough. 

That was enough because I was able to draw on both of those experiences also in social marketing working one of the and this is closer to your own line of work. I think a great organization when I was in undergrad, Toronto Manifest Communications, a real pioneer around smoking cessation and, you know, bringing some of the the sensibilities of Madison Ave, I guess, to the really vexing social challenges of our day. And so I had in the space of just three years, this kind of incredibly pressed experience in marketing, in business journalism and in public policy.  And none of it was by design. I guess it was some of that same sensibility from when I was younger. I was just really curious about stuff, but I wanted to go to the places that seemed most interesting where they were doing it. 

Yeah. And tell me now, like where you are now and tell me about MASS LBP and how you how do you talk about the work that you're doing there? 

Yeah, so I I mean, now it all at all. It only makes sense in retrospect, right? Like at the time, I was just going from thing that was interesting to thing that was interesting.  And any listener might say, well, that seems really premeditated. Not not in the least. I never expected it was not an aspiration to have my own organization.  But there was one other really key formative experience that led to where I am now, which is leading a team of eight people, this bizarrely named organization, Mass LBP. The LBP is just a bit of whimsy. It stands for “Led By People.” 

And MASS is the idea of the mass public, but also kind of a high minded reference to Thomas Paine, who wrote in On Liberty, “There's a massive sense that lies in a dormant state that government should quietly harness.” And that's really the description of what our organization is about. It's about this belief that in a mass society, there need to be  interlocutors. We need ways to tap that sense and bring it to good effect.  And I'll talk more about how we do that in a moment. But, you know, all of that only makes sense if I just connect those dots between those formative experiences and communications and policy. And then deciding that maybe I should do a doctrine. 

Now, any of my friends would have told you that, yeah, he's really interested in a bunch of things, but he's not much of a scholar. Nevertheless, my friends were doing it. So I thought while I was in the UK, maybe I should do it too. 

And and, you know, for the scantest of reasons, the LSE let me in and they gave me enough rope basically to hang myself. So I got it in my head that I was going to come back because I've always had a powerfully anti elitist streak to me. I don't like I've been fortunate to be close to a lot of, you know, I guess fancy institutions, but I don't think of myself as a fancy person. 

I don't like the limelight or the trappings that come with power and riches. And, you know, I had always studied politics, but also studio art university and I got it in my mind that I wasn't going to go to Ottawa and study like the prime minister's office or how parliament works. I was instead going to look at what had been a totally neglected, slightly maligned and misunderstood part of our entire parliamentary apparatus. 

And it was our constituency offices, what you'd know as congressional offices. And in Canada, we actually didn't have them until about the 1970s. And to go to a constituent office is to like find a strip mall next to the variety store in the dry cleaner where you are going to find some of the hardest working mostly women who are just trying to make a difference and try and sort stuff out for residents of their community. 

But, you know, political science had no interest in all of this. So I got in my mind that not only would I come back to Canada, I would take a look at these offices. I would visit almost 100 of them, which was a nice excuse to see the country. 

I'd get in. I had a Suzuki truck at the time. I'd spend a couple of months.  I'd drive across the country. I'd talk to all these people. Gave me a very different window on the politics. Again, you know, mirroring what I'd seen that decade before in what we call Queen's Park as a page. Now I would like still stay close to the institution, but I didn't talk to any of the electeds. I talked to the folks who were working for them. 

What was the attraction there? I mean, you talked about you're not a fancy guy. Youdon't think of yourself as fancy. And that seems like a good way of avoiding fancy. But what was the attraction or what were you thinking at that time? 

I thought it was just very peculiar that Parliament had what is effectively a root system that had been wired up in the 1970s and that nobody had thought to ask, what is this thing? How does it work? And there was obviously a kind of performative aspect, which was like, not only will I visit 10 of them, I will visit them in every corner of the country and I will keep doing this thing. 

And it's because I think just instinctively I felt as though there was something important and maybe even a little bit, it sounds a bit much, but even a little bit noble about what was going on in this space. Even though, what I appreciated was the contracts between Parliament with its fancy masonry and copper and green velvet and all the trappings. And here is this aesthetically junk space. 

But this is the thing that is supposed to be brokering the connection to people in the space between elections. And I found that aesthetic contrast really interesting. So I went and nobody talked to these people and they gave me a very different window onto politics. 

They gave me a different way of thinking about politics, but I was really struck because when I would ask them, okay, that's great. You help people get their passports and their benefit checks and deal with the bureaucracy or their ombudsman or their advocate, you help navigate. These people who you think have terrible jobs, they take such pride in the work they do.  I found that so honest and so cool.

I would say, when was the last time you had a town hall meeting? And then the blood would kind of drain from their faces. And one woman in Newfoundland, which any of your listeners might know is one of our more, you know, shoot from the hip parts of the country. She said, “Well, boy, why would we want to do that? You only get out the mad, the bad and the sad anyway.”

I thought, wait, wait, wait, wait, what are you talking about? You guys are all like pro public.  You're all like, how can we help people? And in fact, these offices were created by, you know, a female politician who ran on the slogan, keep in touch. The purpose was never service provision. It was to create a conversation and sustain it. They defaulted to being about, you know,passports and benefit checks, which is all really important. But here's the thing they were supposed to do, and they're actually afraid of doing it. 

And I thought, well, that's interesting because we're supposed to think about ourselves as a mature democracy, right? But this doesn't feel like surely a mature democracy would know how to bring the community together and have an effective conversation. And in those hundred offices, I found very, very few, like count them on one hand, offices that felt that they knew how to do that well. 

And so that really stuck with me and I didn't know what to do with that. Again, I didn't have it in mind that I wanted to, you know, reinvent public consultation or think about public deliberation in a different way. And it was only because there was a rip in time.  In 2004 BC, British Columbia had an election. The result was totally disproportionate. And, you know, we don't give enough credit to contingency as a driver of political affairs. 

But the right people were in the right place and they decided to run this seemingly crazy process, a giant jury called a citizens assembly. And I was moving east to west. I was in BC near the tail end of this process in the great tradition of doctoral students.  I had my blinders up. I paid very little attention to it. I thought it was probably some flaky left coast political gimmick. I didn't want that much to do with it, but it was inescapable. It was literally in the same building where my office was, on the same floor. And I became aware of what was going on, but I kept focused on what I was doing. 

And I went back to Canada a year later. And funnily enough, Ontario decided to do the exact same thing. It became a bit of a kind of badge of seriousness for politicians wanting to address what we called in the early 2000s, the democratic deficit. And again, you can't plan these things. This incredible professor who'd been my mentor and supervisor when I was doing my master's, he said, Pete, I'm now the academic director of the Ontario citizens assembly. You should come take a look at it. 

And I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not interested. He said, I'll buy you a beer. Come and take a look at it.  And I did. And one thing led to the next. And I ended up helping to run the parallel high school students assembly. 

The province did a grown up assembly and a students assembly. And all of this was about making a recommendation as to whether we've changed the voting system. And here's how I connect the dots to today, Peter.  I went to the adult assembly. I helped run the student assembly. I got to talk to dozens of MPPs about the process of organizing interviews with the members of the students assembly. 

And then I read what the press was saying. So, you know, the Toronto Sun, which is our -remind me that who which Murdoch owned New York paper, there is …

The New York Post.

Okay, so our version of the New York Post ran this shitty column, which was like, who are these people who have so little going on in their lives that they give up 18 Saturdays to advise the province on electoral form.  And again, remember what I said about elites and fancy and this like now I'm now I'm starting to feel like this isn't cool. And then we have the Toronto Star now that the Toronto Star is like, it's like our guardian. It's it's it's the kind of center left paper.  It has these beautiful things called the Atkinson Principles, which is like a testament to its kind of pro social sensibilities. And it's just the same damn thing. It says, you know, these are a bunch of nobodies. 

And I think to myself, now hang on, even my old prophet, U of T, the sort of dean of Ontario politics, says these people are ridiculous. I said, well, wait, you know, we keep lamenting the fact that folks won't vote. They won't turn out to a town hall meeting. And when the government of Ontario sent 100,000 letters to people and said, hey, would you volunteer to give us 18 weekends to study something as fundamental as the electoral system? Almost 10,000 people volunteered. 103 were randomly selected.  Nobody dropped out. They were giving of their time to do important public work. Why the hell were we shitting all over them? 

And, you know, MASS is the product of that experience because I felt that, you know, we just, you know, democratic innovations don't come along very often. And we needed to put a hurricane glass around this thing. And so mass was going to try and take the principles and the process that had been demonstrated in B.C. and Ontario. And it managed to piss off a good segment of the Canadian political class. Let's be clear. And see if we could keep a good thing going. 

And my life's work, 17 years of it, at least so far, has been dedicated to trying to build what we now call the deliberative way and has gone further and farther, certainly not just because of my efforts, but because of ways in which other countries have been influenced and the way I was influenced by the Ontario and B.C. process. And I hope because of the more than 50 similar processes we've done since. 

How do you explain Citizens' Assembly to people? I first encountered you at the Bard Summer School. It was my first experience with Citizens' Assembly and deliberative democracy. My instinct, the way it showed up in my mind after day one, was: 'If this is the circus, I want to run away with it.' Do you know what I mean? I was really attracted to everything I heard about what you were describing.

I think I share with you that sort of protective instinct around ordinary people, and I have brought that passion into my own community. When I try to explain Citizens' Assembly, I do my own version, but I don't really know what I'm talking about. So this is why I reached out to you: How do you describe and help people understand what Citizens' Assembly is?

There's an asterisk: The second part of this question is, what's that instinct that dismisses 'the sad, the bad, the mad'? I've had that experience too. We don't seem to trust our neighbors. There's an instinct to feel like, 'Well, you can't really just get a bunch of ordinary people together and have them be productive.'"

So let's take the second question first, because, you know, I think underlying so much of our political dysfunction across the West right now is the fact that we have taken this incredibly vital force in our society. The thing that democracies should be proudest of, that should be investing everything in, learning from, working with the public, right? And we have come to see this incredible resource as a risk. 

And we try and manage the risk. So I've got sympathy from my friend in Newfoundland when she said, bad, bad, sad. Because the reality is the folks who are coming out, weren't probably broadly representative of that public.  Now they had problems that they needed to express or whatever else. But for our so called mature democracy, we really don't have good ways of tapping into working with and learning from the public. So the public itself is a very elusive quality, right? 

Like supposedly I work all the time at the public. I'm not sure if I've ever met it, right? So you could take the largest room in Hudson, New York and say, bring in the public.  You get a stadium in New York City and say, when's it there? No, it's the people who turn out. But we don't have a very sophisticated or routine way of not even bringing the public together, but producing what I think is actually the essence of it. 

The idea of publicness, public-mindedness, public-spiritedness, it's the quality of the public that we want more than a quantity of the public we want. So how do we create processes in our society that manifest for us that quality and which the rest of us on the outside can look at and say, well, that's legit, right? I might have chosen something else, but I'll defer, I'll respect the conclusion of others because they've definitely given it careful thought. 

So much of politics right now is just trying to run the room. It's a simplistic kind of majoritarianism. It's like, if I get 50 plus one, I get 100% of the power.  And you can only play that game so much before people tune out, right? Because it's just, it's facade. So that's all that. 

But what is a citizens assembly? A citizens assembly is like one of our oldest democratic mechanisms. You know it as a jury.  It just happens to be a bigger jury that isn't determining guilt or innocence. It's studying an issue on behalf of a wider community. And like a jury, it's finding consensus.  It's got to keep talking about that verdict until it can speak with one voice and list out a bunch of recommendations. So in this world, we talk about citizens assemblies and deliberation. We talk about sortition and all this fancy stuff. 

These are just problem solving mechanisms that any public body, a government, an agency, an institution can say, hey, let's get together a group of people that demographically match the community that's going to be impacted. Let's be really clear about defining the problem because we all know if you don't have a clearly defined problem, like forget it. So we're going to, we're going to, we're going to be clear about the problem. 

We're going to give people the opportunity to hear from lots of different experts, different points of view. And they're going to bring us back to their best advice. That's what a citizens assembly is.  And that's why it has such versatility in addressing such a wide range, whether it's local state level national challenges. 

Yeah. 

It's politics without the drama. 

I love, I remember at the Bard summer school, you described it as the manufacturer of democratic integrity. I don't know if that's a line that you use a bunch, but it stuck with me because I, I guess my experience of living in a small town. I see how fractious everything is. And it seems like the spaces we have for any kind of conversation. They don't hold the kind of conversation or people don't know how to facilitate the right kind of conversation. And I seem to remember you talking to you about how just calling out how twisted public input is in the government's in the civic space that you have to sort of stand up in front of your entire community and sort of cross the, just the, the intimidation, like the, the, the points of interaction between a citizen and their government are fraught and horribly designed. 

Very well said. I mean, you take the typical town hall meeting and somebody's got a problem. And what do you make them do?  You make them do the exact thing that most like reasonably well adapted people have trouble doing, which is standing in front of a room full of strangers and expressing their concern. What happens is that their heart starts pumping, you know, their, their cortisol levels, the stress response, it starts like surging. And that's why like inevitably people at a microphone, you hear that kind of shaking their voice, you see their hands start to vibrate, they're in a stress response.  And I just think, how crummy is that? Right? Like, here we are again, a mature democracy. 

Like the only way we get to hear from people is when we put them in like a total fight or flight, you know, mindset. We ought to be able to do, to do better. And I don't think that citizens assemblies are the only way to do things.  We need lots of different routines. But, you know, one of my nerdiest jokes is like, what's the difference between a first term Congressperson and a member of the public? About half a million dollars in human resources. 

Yeah. Right? Like, so what if we actually put 500 bucks or 5,000 bucks behind a member of the public so that, you know, they have somebody to help them think through the options. 

They have the opportunity to call some witnesses or get some research done to inform their view. We create such a delta between the capacity of our electeds and the members of the public that, you know, that imbalance is part of what I think is perpetuating some of the antagonism that we see roiling our politics. Yeah. 

You mentioned the deliberative wave. Can you tell me a little bit more about that and what you think is driving it? I mean, that a guy like me encountered deliberative democracy seems sort of strange.  You know what I mean? And I'm just wondering what you've seen. You've been, you've been part of this all the whole time.  How do you feel about where it is now? And why is it growing in the way that it's growing? 

So I got to go back to my university two weeks ago and give a talk. And I showed this photo that I really, really like. It's a picture from Belgium a couple of years ago in the parliamentary chamber of Ost, Belgium, which is like a region and it has its own parliament. 

There are only like 18 or 20 members to it. And you see in the photo, all of these people sitting in what looks like a council chamber, very modern, very, very nice, very modern. And then you see another group of people. 

You only see their backs and it's about 14 people and they're facing these people. And it reminded me of a photograph or not a photograph, of course, but a painting from the kind of mid 18th century in Canada. The first meeting of the elected legislature of Lower Canada. 

And on one side you have the Legislative Council. These are all the people who've been appointed to govern. Then on the other side, you've got all the people who have just been elected to govern.  And you think about what's like, what must it have been like in that room, right? Well, that's what you're seeing in Belgium today. You're seeing a group of people who've been randomly selected on one side of the picture and a bunch of people who have been elected on the other side of the picture. 

So where's the deliberative way? It is somewhere in history, right? Because changes to governance unfold over hundreds of years.  And sometimes they rush warrants and sometimes they fall back. You know, in Canada from the time we decided we would start electing people, it took about another 90 years for that to be the norm for how we would govern our provincial affairs. It then took another 110 years to decide everybody who's an adult would get the vote.

So that's a 200 year project right there. And so what we're seeing is about 20 years into this deliberative wave right now. And the incredible thing is there have been about a thousand processes around the world, either at the local level or at the national level, where people have been randomly selected and asked to give government their best advice. 

You know, from Canada, it jumped the pond over to Ireland. They actually managed to secure some really important constitutional reforms. Politicians like Emmanuel Macron used a national assembly on climate change to address the concerns of those yellow vest protests that were rocking the country. 

And from there, lots of Europeans said, hey, if you can deal with, you know, same sex marriage in a very Catholic country like Ireland, you can deal with climate in France, maybe we got some problems too. What we're seeing now is the wave sweep back into the United States. And I can count about a dozen municipal assemblies that are going to happen in the next year. 

And I strongly believe that this approach, which is super pragmatic, which isn't about partisanship, which is entirely about how do we solve real problems together, is actually like deeply consistent with the American political psyche. Notwithstanding your incoming president, notwithstanding Red America, Blue America, I'm talking about like Main Street, USA, where there's always been this idea that like regular people can get together, they can talk plainly about things, they can solve problems. So I think when we start to see some of these municipalities deliver, politicians very quickly will say, yeah, we need more of this in our democratic life. 

Are there any projects in particular that you're thinking of in the states that you're keeping an eye on? 

In fact, we're advising one of them in Boulder, Colorado. And Boulder is considering, I mean, they're committed to running an assembly, it's going to be about land use planning, which of course is really a challenging topic for a lot of places in the US because of the price of housing, changes to density in more mature neighborhoods, and often the existence of green belts or urban land reserves that are held back. So they're going to be using an assembly to get into all of those contentious issues. 

Interesting.

I have a dream topic, though, for America. 

Oh, nice. 

Because a lot of my American compatriots, they say, you know, we need we need to deal with the really tough stuff. We need to deal with Roe v. Wade.  We need to deal with handguns. We need to deal with immigration. And I don't want to make light of any of those topics because they are so critical and they are so painful for so many people.  But I also think that when you bring a new show to town, you have to open off Broadway, right? You never want to take on the biggest stage your first time out. Yes. 

And that's why I think there should be an American citizens assembly on the future of the penny. The penny has been one of the most absurd facts of American economic life for the better part of 40 years. I understand from a lengthy piece in The New York Times that it costs you something like two and a half cents to manufacture every penny.  And each penny is only used once and then it gets stuck in a giant jar. 

And people have been lobbying your mint and your treasury for decades to eliminate the penny. And most other countries have eliminated their penny. We've eliminated the penny in Canada. But you won't be surprised to know that there are some powerful interests that are defending the penny. My God. 

I don't want to prejudge the outcome, but I'm just going to suggest if you were to impanel 50 Americans, one from every state, and they were to hear from different sides of this issue. They could make a recommendation to your secretary of the treasury that decided either you need the penny or maybe it was time to let her go. And that would that would be a good thing, but it would also demonstrate the capacity of Americans to exercise good sense on very practical issues. 

It's beautiful.  I just lost my question. I was going to ask, oh, well, what do you love about the work? Like, where's the joy in your work for you? 

So, you know, I'm a pretty lucky guy. You know, your viewers can't your listeners can't see me, but they can probably guess a guy named Peter McLeod, white guy, straight, married, got a kid, product of two public school teachers. I've had a good life.  And, you know, I was able when I was 13 or 14 to go to the legislature and be a page and have all of these experiences where I never really wanted to be a part of big important institutions, but I never felt estranged from them. Is that we don't care who you are, where you come from. A letter comes through your door. 

You decide, yeah, I want to be a part of this thing and you volunteer. And then my team, if you're randomly selected, suddenly calls you up and it's like white glove concierge service. We treat you like you have been elected and we support you to bring your best.  And I love being in the room and seeing these people for whom this may be the closest they ever get to government. They've never met a politician. They've never been to the city council or their legislature. 

Honestly, you know, a lot of people go through life without anybody asking their opinion about anything, whether it's in public life or too much of their private life and certainly their economic life in a workplace. We talk a lot in political science about representation. You know, what is effective representation?   You know, rep by pop. How many politicians should we have per capita? What about the proximity between people and their electives?  

What we offer is something different, but is integral to our democratic health. It's recognition. It is the fact that people sometimes close to the first time in their life, they really feel heard and valued because they are.

And what excites me about the potential of this work is that we can take all of this stuff that seems so banal, so inconsequential regulations, you know, various kinds of legislation about who gets what and what goes where. That seems like such a chore and we can actually make that the basis of a platform for giving people a sense of their personal and collective efficacy.

We can use it to give them an even greater sense of their self worth in our society.  That's magic. And it's something that is in such short supply in our democratic society because all of the status is basically monopolized by 100 or 200 people who sit in our legislatures, our parliaments, our congresses. And we always talk about, oh, they must have such a terrible job, so hard, so hard to be a politician.  Look, they wouldn't keep doing it if it was so miserable. They got to be getting something. And what it is, is status.  We need to democratize that experience of status in our society.

Oh, that's beautiful. I think I'll just end there. I want to thank you so much for your time. You were so generous to accept my invitation, and I really appreciate it very much. It's been an absolute treat. 

Thanks for having me on.

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