EP 156: Prioritizing Growth in Community | John Wood Jr.

Welcome to Radical Responsibility, the podcast dedicated to ridding the world of blame and shame, where we explore the issues you care about from a unique perspective. 100% ownership for each and every circumstance we face in life, day in and day out. Hi. Welcome to the Radical Responsibility podcast. This is your host, Fleet Law. And today I'm having a conversation with John Wood, Jr. If you've been concerned about the incredible political divisiveness in our culture, the complete breakdown of the public comments, our inability to even have conversations with each other anymore, it just. It seems like it's getting worse and work week in and week out that it's getting worse and worse. John Wood, Jr. Is involved in a project where they actually train us. They bring people together from across the political divide. Here in the US it's the blue red divide. You know, the conservatives, liberals, Republicans, Democrats, and they actually train us how to have conversations with each other and then facilitate people who would normally never talk to each other and stay in their silos listening to their preferred news outlets. They bring people together. To me, this is the hope for our country, really, and the hope for humanity. If we can't start figuring out how to listen to each other again and have conversations together, there's really not much hope. And John Wood, Jr. Is. Is right in the heart of that work. A former. He's an African American, former candidate for US Congress from the Republican Party, but he's really someone who's trying to bring people of all political backgrounds and persuasions together across those political divides to have real human conversations. So give it a listen. Really important work. John Wood, Jr. Welcome. John.

Hello, Fleet. It's wonderful to be back with you.

Yeah, great to see you again. I've really been looking forward to this conversation, and I want to share a little bit of just your background bio with our audience. So those who don't know you, they'll get to know you a little bit, and then we'll jump right into the conversation. Sound good?

By all means.

Okay, so John Wood, Jr. Is a former nominee for Congress, U.S. congress, and a former Vice chairman of the Republican Party of Los Angeles County. A noted writer and speaker on subjects of political and racial reconciliation, John's written work has been featured in publications including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington examiner, and Colette Magazine. He is a national spokesperson for the bipartisan organization Braver Angels, and lives in South Los Angeles with his wife and three children. So, again, welcome. Thank you very much for being part of our summit.

It's my pleasure.

These last couple of years have just Been off the charts challenging for all of us with this global pandemic. Hopefully there is a silver lining. I think there are some of just the fact that globally, everybody on the planet has gone through this experience. You think that would be unifying on some level, but it has been a tough couple of years with a lot of tragic loss for so many people and the lockdowns and the divisiveness that's arisen out of figuring out how to best deal with the pandemic and so forth, along with so many other challenges related to climate change and geopolitical instability and so forth. But to begin with, I'm just wondering, how has it been, you know, we spoke a year ago. How's this last barrier been for you and your family, your community? I know you went through Covid yourself and I hope you've completely recovered.

Well, thank you for that, Fleet. And yes, you know, well, I did find myself in the grips of COVID at the very beginning of last year. And it hit at a particularly vulnerable moment for me, just sort of emotionally and psychologically. I can remember my very worst day in terms of symptoms. And it seemed like everybody in my household got it. For whatever reason, it hit me a little bit harder than it hit the others. And, you know, I mean, I was okay, I was okay. But my very worst day, just about in terms of symptoms, just happened to be January 6th, or seeking a little bit of relief from, you know, what I was going through. I just made the mistake of turning on the news, you know, or somebody messaged me and told me to turn, turn on the tv. And when I did, you know, just sickness on top of sickness, if you will, just sort of, sort of befell me. And, you know, it's remarkable to sort of consider the intersections in some sense of sort of the, you know, obviously the global contagion that has frightened us, changed our way of living and taken too many from. From us, but intersecting with the sort of civic contagion of distrust, institutional decline. And as a consequence, I would argue of much of that, a degree of volatility and extremism sort of flaring up in the body politic. And we can give more examples than just January 6th. We don't have to, but I think that there is a clear way in which our inability to trust each other, to operate in goodwill towards each other and cripples our capacity to respond to the things that threaten us physically because we've been weakened spiritually and interpersonally. And so for me, these things are all very much, intimately Connected. And you know, the last year since, you know, about the last time we, we spoke, you know, of course this is the year following the long year of 2020, which we will all remember. But things have scarcely become less dramatic since then. This year has been, I think, a chance for braver angels and many across the country to sort of take stock of the experiences that had recently sort of preceded us, the price that we've paid as a country for not prioritizing a growth towards the beloved community, for not prioritizing a deeper culture of empathy across our cultural divides. And to take this period of time between elections to begin to sort of re articulate the stakes of what the consequences are of not committing to this sort of relationship building work in the context of American democracy. And to find out those Americans, those groups, those friends and allies who are willing to conscientiously strive towards a more humanizing civic discourse. And we have been very encouraged by the comrades in arms that we have discovered in this period of time. And now I feel very excited that we are in a moment to where we can have a strongly felt cultural and social, and I would say lowercase spiritual impact.

On the tone and tenor disposition of our politics in this year and in the years immediately before us. So it's a time of growth and a time of choosing in some sense. But I couldn't be happier to stand where I stand within that.

Well, that's incredibly hopeful to hear you say that. And we're going to explore all that in some depth today in our conversation. The overall scope of inquiry for this summit is really how can we sort of, you mentioned that kind of crippling of our, of our social cohesion, the commons, our connection with each other, that has really been to our own detriment. So how do we rebuild that? How do we build the individual collective systemic resilience? We need to come together in this country and around the world as one human family to address the really daunting challenges facing humanity today, whether it's, you know, global warming and the pretty serious climate disruptions headed our way from that, or whether it's increasing geopolitical conflict. We have the tragic invasion and refugee crisis in Ukraine right now in Eastern Europe, which is just a series of continuing wars that we are continually having around the world, including in the Middle east with Syria and Iraq and Afghanistan and conflicts around the world. And so we have our work cut out for us and there's emergency to it. And, and yet it seems really hard for us to come together to have the collective will to address these problems. And so that's kind of my concern, that we're going to stay stuck or mired in these kind of left, right, right, left culture wars and the bubbles and echo chambers of our own ideas that's exacerbated today by social media and the mainstream media as well. And. And that, you know, that we won't be able to come together before it's too late, you know, before we're really going to see some real, real breakdowns, even collapses in some of the structures we've counted on for a long time. So I realize that presents a bit of a dark view and hopefully that doesn't come to pass. But certainly I think there are real risks out there. And so I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the work of Brave Rangels, because I know the very purpose of your organization is to bridge these divides, to bring people together across these, to kind of depolarize. And not only you try to bring people together from different political and cultural backgrounds and belief systems and what have you mindsets, but you train them in how to have conversations together, how to find their way together in genuine dialogue. So I wonder if you could just share a bit about Brave Angels, how you got involved in it, what it's all about.

Absolutely. Well, yes, I'm happy to do that. And of course, you're right to be concerned about all the things that you articulated fleet. And there's a way in which we do need to be mindful of time as a factor in this equation. It's like when you're steering a cruise ship and you see an iceberg. You can't start turning the wheel only as you come up on it, you have to start turning well before you get within reach of it in order to avoid it. And so, yes, I mean, we're in this moment where surely there will already be some consequences for things that have already been set in motion. Nevertheless, there's still plenty of good work to be done that I think will set the stage for a shifting of the paradigm beneath our feet, one that will allow us to avoid the very sort of polarized stagnation that you mentioned. So braver angels work is as follows. First of all, let me say that braver angels, originally called better angels, as in the better angels of our nature, quote pulled from Abraham Lincoln's first inaugural address as he sought to stave off to avoid the civil war, speaking of large icebergs, you know, that weren't able to be turned away from in time, but braver angels is America's largest grassroots bipartisan organization engaged in the work of political depolarization. But I tend to like to deepen that explanation by saying that our work is really about the revival of the communal spirit of American democracy, if you will. The revival of a spirit of democratic engagement that allows us to see each other across our divides as neighbors. And to recognize the fact that democratic participation is about much more than merely voting, much more than shouting your rebuttals to your most or least favorite pundits on the TV screen or the computer screen or the radio. That really has to do with getting to know the person not next to you, speaking the truth of your convictions, but doing so in a way that models goodwill towards the other side so that we can sustain relationships with each other.

Right?

Because ultimately the strength of democracy rests upon the strength of our social fabric. And so Braver Angels is active in this sort of work across four sectors, increasingly five sectors of American life. Government, we have work across, enrolling in Congress, in the House of Representatives, in state and local governments across America. Campuses, you know, academia, we have programs across campuses and universities. Media, we have a fledgling digital media network that gets stronger year by year. I'm a co host of the Braver Angels podcast. And we have many exciting personalities engaging in the media space, arts and culture. We have a singer, songwriter community about 150 strong across the nation, using music as a means to bring people together across difference. But more than anything, we're rooted in local communities. Grassroots, we are 10,000 members, dues paying members strong, 75 local bipartisan alliances across across the country and growing. And so our organization does a wide range of things. But.

Our core activities begin with a number of workshops that are meant to strengthen various parts.

Of the civic muscle of the individual, if you will, and to provide context or containers for people to establish relationships of trust and to work on communication with people from the other side. So I'll give you a brief example, but our very first workshop that was designed by our co founder, Professor Bill Dougherty, William Doherty of the University of Minnesota, psychologist and renowned family therapist. It's called a Red blue workshop. And what we do in that workshop is we bring together small groups of individuals.

From the left and the right, or blues and reds, as we say in house, red and blue. Not to argue or debate politics, but to speak from the vantage point of their own personal or lived experience in terms of why they see politics the way that they do. It's an opportunity for each side to be able to give voice to their experience, but to also reflect on the ways in which their own side of the aisle might be complicit in some of the toxicification, if you will, of our civic discourse. And in the course of that sort of an interaction, friendships and trusts are established that then get sort of built out within the larger body of our community. We have workshops that are aimed specifically at cultivating the capacity for us to empathize well, to be able to communicate empathetically and persuasively in conversation by uplifting humility in the way we speak to each other. We emphasize the importance of I statements as opposed to factual statements. Many of us have a tendency to say things like, well, it's just the fact that Barack Obama was the greatest president for health care, it was just the fact that Donald Trump was the best president for the American economy or what have you, depending on your political point of view. But even if you're saying something that is factually correct, if you just introduce your point as something that is a priori, right, just because you're the person who's saying it, or because you think you have the facts on your side, turns conversation into a debate. It turns it into a competition. And when it becomes a competition, we lose our capacity to listen to one another.

Right?

And so that's something that needs to be overcome. We have a wide range of workshops along these lines, including something, I'll mention one more piece called a depolarizing within workshop. And I'd like to mention this one because this is about monitoring your own internal dialogue, taking inventory of the ways in which we. We may, in these sort of automatic sort of cycle.

Of our unmonitored thoughts, maybe thinking in stereotypical or dehumanizing terms about people on the other side. And we give individuals tools to be able to recognize when we are doing this internally and to be able to counteract it so that when we do meet somebody from the other side of the aisle, we are in a position to see their humanity as opposed to projecting an artificial construct of who they are as a human being based merely on their party affiliation or their politics.

Again, we have a wide range of activities, but it begins with these core experiences, when people join braver angels or when they participate in these experiences. And you don't have to be a member to participate in our workshops, by the way, but many people who do become members later. You then have the opportunity to. To use the skills that you cultivate to build on the relationships that you've established in your own local community through A Brave Rangels alliance, or to otherwise participate in our work as a volunteer in any number of ways across sectors and across the country. So that's a little bit of a taste of the flavor of what we do.

Yeah. Thank you for that, John. And so I assume during the past few years, you've been doing some of this work online.

Well, you know, it was an interesting thing because prior to the pandemic, we were sort of moving at a leisurely pace towards seeing if we could successfully convert some of our workshops to online formats. Just sort of tinkering and experimenting with that. But we were just almost entirely an organization committed to in person, gather.

I can imagine. Yeah. The value of that. Absolutely.

Well, yeah. And, you know, there is certainly a way in which in person connection is. Is, you know, is. Is irreplaceable just in terms of the degree of connection which it tends to allow a person to. To foster. I mean, I love being able to see you on the screen here, Fleet, and I am very grateful for the technology that allows us to do so. But it would still be wonderful to shake your hand and, you know, and.

Absolutely.

And break bread together, cruise your bookshelf in person where I could see the titles a little. A little closer up. But, you know, when. When the lockdown went into effect and the world went online initially, yeah, we had some pretty serious concerns about our own ability to continue because we thought, you know, does what we do? Does it work? Will it work online? Will. Will we have the same impact? Can we even pull it off logistically? Well, we turned all of our attention to that question. And lo and behold, notwithstanding what I just said, Fleet, it did wind up being a blessing insofar as one, we were able to shift our programming online. Some of it was more difficult to convert than others, but that's something we were successfully able to do. And it allowed us to reach many more people, and it allowed us to bring people together from across greater distances. Because obviously, one of the clear points of utility for this sort of technology is that physical distance is just no option. So suddenly, we could. Rather than everybody having to be in a certain place in Rhode island or California, we could take folks in Rhode island, in California and bring them into a workshop together.

Ultimately, our reach and our impact and our relevance has only grown during the pandemic. Having said that, I am still very much looking forward to our being able to sort of, you know, re. Establish our on the ground presence, you know, as things perhaps.

Judiciously and sort of, you know, carefully returned to some degree of normalcy, but we're never going to go back to being entirely in person. I think that our on online reach and infrastructure is here to stay. Yeah.

And I think so many organizations have discovered this. Certainly my work, we were kind of lucky that we were doing a lot online before the pandemic hit, but we also were doing a lot in person. And I was traveling constantly around the world.

But we shifted everything online. And, you know, this beautiful audience of folks committed to resilience here, the Global Resilience Summit, is reaching people all over the world. So it's absolutely wonderful. And at the same time, there is some inherent value in that in person connection. And I think also in terms of kind of what we're talking about, about trying to reestablish.

Even within the US where we both live, but worldwide, in various communities and various countries around the world to recreate that sense of, well, the beloved community, ideally, that you referenced from Dr. King. But you know, even just some sense of a commons of a body politic where you can have reasonable conversations and where we, where we believe in compromise and believe in the values of the enlightenment and liberal democracy and can come together in that way, you know, there's, there's ways that we can recreate that fabric online. I mean, I think that, you know, the worldwide net, all this technology allows us to weave certain fabrics were up against social media, which exacerbates the divisiveness. We now know that even the algorithms are set up to exacerbate that. But at the same time, I think there's a need to do it locally, you know, so there's some sense of it's all well and good, I think, you know, I'm on various kinds of zoom calls and video conferences every day of the week, and I've been on calls with people in Ukraine in the last few days and people around the world. These connections are profound. But I think another part of the work of recreating the social cohesion we need is going to be local and need to be local. So I'm just wondering if you could say something about that balance of how we can reweave the fabric of our social cohesion, both maybe at the regional, national, international level through these technologies, but also the need to do it locally face to face, in person.

Well, you know, the model of social impact that Braver Angels is developing and building upon is really one that is meant to sort of germinate a shift in our norms across the levels that you've mentioned. And for us, the way this works Is I mentioned this sort of a bit of the spectrum of experiences that we provide for people. And they go through these experiences and they establish relationships, but in so doing, they're developing attitudes and again, sort of civic muscles for communication and relationship building that they bring back home with them, right? Or bring back to whatever their particular context may be. So people who engage in our work take the lessons, the teaching, and of course, the sort of the imprint of the relationships and the deepening attitudes of understanding that they find themselves, that they find themselves developing back with them to the workplace, to the classroom, perhaps to their local government, to their neighborhood, to their kitchen table. In a sense, what we seek to do is to pollinate outward norms of trust and empathy building nationally. And of course, we also do this through narrative work, through writing, through media content, seeking to tell a story of who we are as Americans that does not give short shrift to the differences in our lived experiences. That in fact, honors the deep implications of what it means to, let's say, you know, be a white person from the rural south or an African American from. From the inner city who naturally are going to travel different paths and most oftentimes have different outlooks on life. But that also is able to tell a story as that. That highlights the fact that at the end of the day, our common interest in democracy is a common interest in one another as human human beings. A willingness to pursue the truth and trust that we mean well towards one another. Of course, that's at the heart of the beloved community. So that resolves itself in ways that are expressed across great national differences. But at home and local communities, where we can see and feel and touch each other, where we have an interest not just in sort of larger public spending, but also specifically in, you know, are the potholes being filled on the road, are our kids safe walking to school, things of this nature, you know, we seek to create context for connection that translate to more collaborative relationships on that level of society, which really in some sense is the front line of our social divisions, but also sort of the place where some of the most fertile soil is for transcending them. Because, you know, somebody said that it's hard to hate up close, you know, when you're in a position to really sort of see people, you know, as they are, as opposed to abstracted, let's say, on a Twitter thread or something, where it's just a line of text on a controversial issue. And all that tells me all I need to know about. About this person, right? And then, you know, you pile on it becomes an ugly and nasty thing. Well, you know, in local communities where we are close to each other, where we can see each other and polarization is getting worse on that front too. But there are also more opportunities to turn it around in an immediate and tangible sort of way. That's why one thing I like to do is speak to local elected officials, for instance, because they tend to be in a position to model this empathy building conversation in ways that are direct and tangible that big national politicians oftentimes would have more difficult time being able to do. So every level of our divides matter and are relevant. But I do think that you're right to pay particular attention to the local manifestation of these issues. Where we live still matters. Even in an era of high technology and globalization. I would argue that the local still.

Ought to be pretty well centered in our minds.

Well, especially since if some of the worst predictions of the kind of collapses that could come with climate disruptions, the whole net could go down. And then we're going to be, we better be networked locally. Right. We're going to need each other, but hopefully we'll be able to act before we get to that. But yeah, I think listening to you, I think we're actually all involved in a really grand experiment where over the last two years, you know, we've gotten much more connected online all around the world. You know, there's so many new connections that have been forged. I mean, I mean our work is, it's just expanded dramatically in the criminal justice work we do and putting on the summits like we do the trauma healing, resilience work that we do, meditation, teaching, I'm on regular, you know, group meditations now with people from around the world and you know, many people that, you know, study with a particular teacher or something, maybe used to go get to see them once a year to retreat somewhere that cost them a fair bit to fly there and the housing and, and now they're, they're on, they're online every week, you know, getting access to these same things. So there's been this amazing time which I think has also creates this incredible cross pollination and cross fertilization and, and I think as we begin to emerge from the pandemic and venture out into the shared physical space with each other again, which hopefully is kind of happening. It's already happening many places. And you know, we, we feel safe enough to get back to some normalcy of the way we used to connect with each other in person and locally in our neighborhoods and stores and restaurants and local Establishments that cross fertilization that's been going on globally will somehow then land at the local level and create something new, create new possibilities. I mean, that's kind of what I was hearing and listening to. And to me, that's a very exciting prospect and something to really pay attention to in the next couple years.

Well, you know, and it's also a description of what it may look like for us to develop structures and systems, really systematic empathy building, systemic empathy building, if you will. Right. Which is necessary because right now we have systemically ingrained perverse incentives towards polarization and division and dissolution in the major structures and institutions of society. I mean, the way that the political parties operate naturally, politics is supposed to be competitive, but it used to be that the political parties are also trying at the end of the day to sort of develop coalitions and consensus within their parties that could then speak to American society, broadly speaking. But the business model of politics has changed to where what you really want to do now these days is build up sort of the rabid ferocity of your base so you can get somebody from the wings to be nominated and then turn up the vitriol enough to where even if you get most of the rest of the country to hate you, you can get to that 50% plus one that'll allow you to seize power even if you've ruined the well of trust, poisoned the well of trust between the American people in the process. Because short term power acquisition is suddenly the thing that's guiding our mindset. And the media is exactly the same way. And it's evolved. Its business model has shifted in exactly the same way. I mean, it used to be. There's always a risk of overly romanticizing the era of Walter Cronkite and so forth in the golden age of journalism. But nevertheless, that was an era of journalism in which the idea was to speak to the American people broadly, to be able to frame the issues in such a way to where, whether you are right or left or living in the city or in the country, we could say that we occupied something of a shared universe with a shared sort of source of authority. And, you know, even the sort of tone of, you know, broadcasting comes from the fact that, you know, back in those days, the practice was to not try and signal any bias towards one side or the other so much, but within our human limitations, do the best we could to cast an objective appreciation of facts and reality so that the American people could converse more effectively amongst one another, and that that sort of business model would lead to Success in the marketplace. Now again, completely the opposite. Now, news media corporations succeed on the basis of their being able to drive a polarizing storyline, a divisive narrative in a way that allows them to capture a sub segment of the marketplace and own it. Right. We are going to be dominant among conservatives, we are going to be dominant among progressives.

And if we try to communicate in a way that expands the Overton window to bring more people in, well, then we risk losing our market share dominance among this group to somebody else who's going to say things that strike more directly at their fears, their anxieties and the things that they want to hear.

If all Braver angels did was workshops, even theoretically, it wouldn't be enough. But Brave Rangels and other organizations have to be able to work together. To do is to bring build out larger.

Structured and systematic incentives and practices that really do sort of create a marketplace for success where success can be realized by bringing people together as opposed to driving them apart.

Right.

And so, you know, I mean that, that ultimately is precisely what we're trying to do. And if we can accomplish that, it will mean that we have made the practice of goodwill and empathy building sustainable because suddenly we'll be able to work in communal settings and institutional settings alike. And so wouldn't be great fleet if Democrats and Republicans and whoever else were competing with each other actively to see who could best model politics of goodwill towards the other side while still, authentically speaking, from their own convictions. Wouldn't it be nice if the media networks found themselves in competition with each other over who could most powerfully sort of call out the better angels in the nature of the opposition and in their own people and their own native supporters? Wouldn't be nice if the levers of the mechanisms of competition were leveraged in a race upwards towards the spirit of love that characterizes the beloved community as opposed to this race to the bottom that leads people to somehow think that we can destroy the bonds of trust between each other and still have democracy endure, which of course it won't. If that's the pattern. It would be nice to flip these things upside down.

Yes, and I would like to. I mean, I think you're really clarifying what we're up against there. And I would really like to talk about how we can. You know, it seems like we're going to need some structural change. Maybe some of that has to be legislated, but also we need a mindset change. And you know, negativity obviously goes viral, but goodness can go viral too. And so it could be that the right seeds planted could make some real shifts in the hearts and minds of people. But before going to that kind of question of scale, I'd like to get kind of back down on the ground for a moment. So, in the kind of workshops you all have been doing over these last two years, I'm curious about how it's actually worked out, bringing people together. And I don't know what subjects you address in these workshops or if anything's off limits, but I would assume there's been discussions about the January 6th assault on the Capitol that's been called anywhere from an insurrection to a riot, even just a peaceful demonstration that went a little bit awry, depending on people's perspective.

Or whether there's been conversations about vaccination or mask wearing, all these things that have been so politicized. Again, we're in that landscape that you've so aptly described there, where often it takes some kind of almost like a common enemy to bring people together. Like, Europe is more joined now than they have been in three decades. Right, because of what's going on with Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And so we were all up against this pandemic, which could have brought us together just like natural disasters often bring us together, but instead it got politicized in this climate we're in, and the whole thing about mask wearing and all got weaponized politically. So I'm just curious about how some of these conversations have literally gone on the ground around some of these issues that we're all well aware of. I mean, I know even, you know, in my own work, with my own close professional colleagues and friends, I have. I have folks on both sides of these issues and around the vaccination one. And it seems like we get into conversations and it's just, you know, each person's quoting the facts from the bubble or the silo they're in. And, you know, at best, maybe you listen to the other person's facts, but you already are kind of pretty predetermined or prejudiced to not agree with them. And because you have your own set of facts and. And it doesn't really go anywhere. So I'm curious as maybe if we could talk about the work you've been doing around some of these specific issues that a lot of us are so familiar with.

Yes, well, look, this is. This is a great range of inquiry here. And I was just making aside to just note the irony of the fact that, I mean, you're. You're right, Vladimir Putin, over the course of Many years is strategically sown division, you know, within. Within the nations of. Of the West. But now he's proved to be a powerful unifying force.

I mean, I hate. I hate to laugh about it. You laugh to keep from crying. But. But it is. There is something to what you've said, of course. But, you know, I'm glad you bring up the question of, you know, vaccine skepticism and January 6th and specifically, and of course, very deeply connected to that, this question of the legitimacy of the 2020 election. And braver Angels has had to take something of a stand here in terms of trying to really make clear to people the philosophy that guides us as we engage even issues as contentious as these, where the potential for misinformation, spread, of misinformation might have particularly dire consequences. And yet reckoning with the fact that in order for us to build trust between Americans, the American people need to be able to say what they think and what they feel in order to feel welcome into a conversation that might feel safe for them to be able to listen to somebody else with an open mind that says that maybe this person has an angle on the truth or an understanding of something that I would benefit from being able to take in. And maybe I can. I can trust this person in their intentions because this person has just listened to me and has genuinely heard what I've said. And so, you know, let me trust this environment in this relationship with an open ear and an open mind. So here's what I mean by then, Fleet. And to answer your question directly, yes, we have had programming of various different kinds discussing or allowing for the discussion.

Of.

Questions of voter fraud in the 2020 election, conversations over January 6th and vaccine skepticism.

And going into 2020. Well, early in 2021, I remember having a conversation with my boss about.

The predominance of sort of skepticism or flat out rejection of the idea that Joe Biden had legitimately run the presidential election on the right. And now, look, I'm a registered Republican. I believe. I believe that the election was legitimate. It's not my view that it was not. But what I said to my boss and what he agreed with was that if we're really going to bring conservatives into this conversation, doesn't matter what I think did or did not happen on election Day, ultimately they need to be allowed to say what it is they really think and feel. Conservatives in this country feel that the ground is shrinking from underneath them in terms of. Of where they can be honest about what they believe. And you have people on the left who feel that, no, when something is wrong and when an opinion is both wrong and dangerous, we need to make sure that it is removed from airtime and legitimate institutional sort of society. But the consequence of that, so far as I can see.

Let us assume, as I do assume, just in the spirit of candor, that the election was legitimate, but taking it on board, that that's the case, at least in my opinion, and maybe the opinions of some of the folks listening to me right now, it is nevertheless the case that when you take a view that is already well subscribed to among a certain part of the population and you say that this view cannot be aired, you know, within. Within larger society, that view doesn't go away. It goes underground, or it retreats within the circles in which it is already prominent. But it fortifies the echo chamber effect such that anything that is said on the outside that is meant to sort of penetrate, you know, the. The minds of people who are subscribing to the particular point of view, such as the election was stolen, it ensures the fact that those people will not hear that view, will not take it seriously, because in their minds, the only reason you're saying I can't speak the words that I believe is because you're afraid to hear the truth that I have to speak.

Right.

And that maybe you're more interested in deciding what I think and what I feel rather than reckoning the things that I actually believe. Now, I would argue that there is an industry of misinformation that's generating a lot of these views.

On different parts of the spectrum, but certainly in this case, on the right. But that industry is not countered by exiling all the people who may be listening to it right now. Quite the contrary. You're just pushing people into the arms of those who might misinform them further. And so Braver Angels made a decision because we have a very popular debate program that's not about competitive debate in the sense of winning or losing, but is about the communal pursuit of truth designed by my close colleague and friend April Kornfield, formerly April Lawson. And that decision to be willing to play host to debate on whether or not the 2020 election was legitimate, in which ordinary Americans would be able to make their own views heard, but would also be able to. Able to speak to election experts and other authorities, people from both sides of the aisle, that was highly controversial. We had many members. I'll just be honest with you, Fleet. We had many members cancel their membership on the basis of the fact that.

We would be irresponsible enough in their view to hold that conversation. And yet when it was all said and done, and even internally within our Brave Rangers leadership, we had some VA leaders who were like, I don't know about this, but when it was all said and done, it seemed to clearly be the case that people from both sides of the aisle participating in these programs had listened to each other and reckoned with what one another were saying in a spirit of good faith, of goodwill. And that you had people writing in who were clear about the fact they were now thinking about parts of these issues that they had not thought about before simply because of the fact that they didn't trust anybody who had opinions different from their own prior to that. I do think that in that sort of a context, truth has an advantage because it gives us the opportunity to come into contact with reality through each other, through relationships of trust. Again, if we can't rebuild that in America, broadly speaking, we can't suppress our way to long term democratic. We have to take the risk of speaking to each other, the risk of listening to each other, understanding that whatever risks come with that pale in comparison to the certain sort of social dissolution that comes when we fail to do so. And so Brave Rangelist has had to hold fast to that position. But, you know, I, I feel that we've done the right thing in, in doing so. Granted the understandable concerns of folks who, may they think otherwise, well, that's incredibly.

Laudable, incredibly brave, and I think really necessary. I mean, another example, I mean any media outlets and certainly the podcast world wrestle with this, I mean, the recent thing with Joe, Joe Rogan's podcast, now he's so big, he might just say, well, I'm just a podcast. Well, when you have an audience that big, it's like you have responsibility and same way Facebook has responsibility in others. But you know, by, by having that long conversation with a doctor putting a lot of views of vaccine skepticism, he was criticized for providing a platform for disinformation. And he's saying, well, I'm just having conversations with people, right? But you know, I think that one of the things that we sometimes have in the national media is especially around debates and is the fact checking, right? And, and I think maybe we need fact checking with the podcast world and other worlds. So, and then you gotta, you know, there's a lot of fact checking websites you gotta check, there's fact checking the fact checking sites that check the fact checkers, right? Because there's always layers of bias. You try, you try to get to the least Bias you can find. Right, But I think we need that in a lot of places. But then still have the conversations, as you're saying. Right, have the conversation. Because yes, suppression doesn't work. And you know, I've been a liberal Democrat progressive my whole life. Now that landscape is, at least in my view, shifted so far left in recent decades that it's kind of left me without a home. And I'm finding myself feeling a little more like a centrist, which I never would have said two decades ago. When I was in college, I was way over the left side. I was ready to be a revolutionary back in the Vietnam War era practically, you know, but, you know, but one of the criticisms I have of my colleagues on the left is like trying to control and suppress that landscape through the cancel culture and other things and so demonizing people of other views that they actually drive that division. I know it happens from the right to. It's happening from both sides, but that effort to control the landscape only creates further division. You know, I think it's also something you pointed to the way this is, you know, become the business model in politics and media and so forth. Somehow we've developed in America over a period of time this kind of winner take all landscape. I mean, when you think about even in sports, you know, most of the dollars go to the quarterback, the owner, the coach. Now, you know, even I know people that work in films. It used to be you had any job in the film industry or television industry, you were making good money. Now most of that revenue has been pushed towards the stars. And you have this whole industry of agents and lawyers that create that effect. Right. And now we have a political landscape while one party gets in. Well, we're going to shove our views down the other side's throat, you know, whether they like it or not, and demonize them in the process until we get booted out. And then the other side is going to come, you know, and the idea of compromise has just become like people think that's naive or something.

Right.

So somehow we need a major, major shift here in our landscape. And again, I'm curious about how you think.

There'S a lot of work like Brave Rangels is doing in other organizations of planting the seeds of this. But there seems to be so much momentum. I mean, that business model has a lot of momentum. We know, unless somehow, you know, unless, you know, unless the government or legislature steps in and forces folks like Facebook to change their algorithms, social media is continuing to exacerbate outrage and anger and extremism online. And so how are we going to find a way out of this? I mean, I know the work you're doing is on that path, but how do we get this out at scale so we could have a world where there's a genuine appeal? And I agree that in a free society, I believe capitalism needs a lot of regulation, but nonetheless it's delivered more benefit to more people than any system on earth. Whether people want to hear that or not. That's at least that's people argue. Here I go, quoting facts. Right, do your research. Right. There's been a lot of abundance, but it's a lot, a lot of terrible, collateral damaging and especially the environment. So we don't live in a limitless world anymore and we need to regulate things. But still somehow in a pre system, market forces have got to play a role. At any rate, incentives of some kind even just if you want to speak, incentives. And so how do we incentivize compromise? How do we incentivize what you were talking about, you know, wanting to feel how, how good a job can I do at bringing people together? How good, how good a job can I do to speaking to our wholeness and to our unity? You know, if our leaders and political parties and businesses and the media were motivated that way, how do, how can we shift things to incentivize that? I mean, maybe the seeds will happen where the, where we begin to demand that as a country and as people. Or is it something we have to legislate to sort of change the mechanisms that will more lend itself to there being incentives to come together instead of incentives driving us apart?

Yeah, well, you know, Fleet, you know, right before you and I started recording here, you and I, we were talking a little bit before about how times of trouble, you know, the upside, the silver lining is that they do tend to be the occasions in which which humanity sort of steps back, takes a look at itself and decides, you know what, reflecting on the things we've done wrong, suddenly we may be attaining some imaginative clarity in terms of what could go right and what we have to do to get there. And so in line with that, it's important to reach influencers. It's important to engage the powerful institutions and the well known leaders of our society. But fundamentally this shift that we're looking for is going to have to take place from the demand level up and is in fact, I think germinated there. Braver angels is one example of it. But there's a desire for a different way of doing things, which is powering the work of different organizations and enterprise and movement oriented associations. And I can, I can think of a few different folks I've engaged. I mean, Andrew Yang, who I'm sure you're familiar with, has started something called the Forward Party. I've had to sort of reckon with myself and find myself increasingly sympathetic to the idea that maybe one sort of, you mentioned legislation, maybe one sort of important larger democratic reform that will be perhaps in a way important to a larger project of depolarization here, maybe impacting the way we vote in America. Maybe introducing something like ranked choice voting, which allows you to not just pick between the lesser of two evils, but sort of rank and order the candidates in a multi sort of candidate field that you would prefer and say, this is my first choice, but this person would be my second. This person would be my third. Why? Because they would call upon us to have engage with nuance on the issues, on what the different candidates have to offer, and it would tend to produce an outcome that would more, I think, precisely reflect the real will of the voters. Because right now we find ourselves in situations all the time where you got two candidates that most people on either side don't necessarily want, but that's just what we have to choose from because of the way the selection mechanisms are developed. So I mean, that's something that I've thought about a bit more and there seems to be momentum and Andrew and the foreign party are capturing it towards those sort of reforms. At the same time, you're right to mention social media, you're right to mention digital technology. Even if we were to effectively impact society in all sorts of other directions, you know, we are pretty well hooked into social networking culture at this point. And so, you know, the incentives in that space need to change. And so in line with that, I've really been pleased and honored.

To have entered into some relationship and collaboration on behalf of Braver Angels with Tristan Harris, who you may be familiar with. Yeah.

Who did the film. Yeah.

The center for Humane Technology is his organization. And you know, Tristan.

And his team have really sort of taken a lead in building relationships between individuals or groups from the technology sector and organizations and leaders from the depolarization and peacekeeping spaces in a way that's meant to allow these sort of wisdom and practices, groups like Brave Angels and others, to begin to inform the approach to digital design right in the technology space. And in the future that may yield a context in which the idea of a strong design for a social media or for site or for any sort of piece of digital architecture is measured not merely according to its ability to capture and monetize your attention, but according to its ability to maximize our ability to socially interact with each other in ways that strengthen the social fabric and our social capital rather than eroding those goods. And so.

So these conversations are happening, these collaborations are heating up, they are multi sector, but we are all still finding each other. And actually, it's an incredibly exciting thing.

It's the light shining through the shadow.

Of our sort of otherwise somewhat depressing state, state of affairs here. You really do have social innovation that is profound and exciting, that has the potential to change the paradigm. And so in that sense, there's no better time to be alive if you've got a heart, to be a part of what a new age of understanding can bring. And so in that way, Fleet, I think that you and I are very much blessed to be on the front lines of this sort of an endeavor. And so.

Absolutely, John, very much, very much the, the, really the reason behind this summit. And, and, but I think you're, you're so right. We, we, we, we need to keep remembering to look for the light because we can see the darkness everywhere and it can seem. And yet there are so many amazing things going on and so many amazing people doing really good work and the seeds being planted for tremendous innovations that could really create the kind of world we all long for. Wherever we are in a political spectrum, we all long for the same thing ultimately. And so I think it's really important to look for that light and keep reminding ourselves that it's there. We're kind of getting towards the end of our time here. I'd like to kind of ask you one last question. It's still kind of going into the roots of some of this. I have a model that it's kind of just come out of the way. I've lived my own life and gotten through some really tough stuff spots, including spending 14 years in prison myself on drug charges that I call radical responsibility. And it really begins with personal responsibility and ownership. I had to take ownership for getting myself into that situation, for the harm I'd caused, how I was going to get through it, and what I'd do with my life afterwards if I had the privilege of getting beyond that. And so I really embraced a high level of personal accountability and ownership. But it's also very much meant to include collective responsibility, really be the integration of both personal and collective responsibility. And I've often lamented that our left, right, political spectrum keeps pulling us apart across those two dimensions and into kind of a false dichotomy. Whereas, you know, traditionally conservatism and the right wants to mainly talk about personal responsibility. And you know, any talk about causes and conditions in the collective is like to swiftly slope away from people take, you know, being responsible and then on the left, they don't want to hear anything about prayer. In fact, I was at a gathering right at the beginning of the pandemic at our local meditation community, and I use the term personal responsibility somewhere just in the conversation and somebody just jumped out of their chair and, you know, found that that is. He said to those of us who are progressive, you have to understand that is a traumatizing word.

Okay. That's how far we've gotten. I, I get it. I can appreciate he was really feeling the pain of that because what it means to him, he feels it's a weaponized term that's used to write to not pay attention to the needs of people and the needs of the collective. The needs blame the victim, licensed forth. Right. But to me, these are false dichotomies. Right. And so I'm really concerned, you know, you, and I hope that you don't mind me going here, but, you know, you're an American black man, you live in, you live in la, you live on South Central la, I believe, or. Yeah, that area. Yeah. And so, you know, you live in the very heart of the black American experience, or at least one part of it. And, and yet you're at least, I don't know whether it's across all dimensions thought. But you're, you're conservative leaning, you're a Republican rescue Republican. And I'm sure you've had to deal with people, you know, a lot of people, you know, from the left and even myself two decades ago, I remember thinking of people like Ben Case and our, or our Supreme Court justice saying, how can there be a black person and be a Republican conservative? And you know, fortunately, I've changed a lot since, since having those ideas, but I'm sure you get that. I'm sure you've been called names, I won't repeat those, but that would imply that you're not black enough or something. And so I'm just wondering what it's like for you having that projected onto you, which to me is the worst elitism that comes from white people assuming they should determine what people of another background political beliefs should be. Right. But so where that falls for you in terms of trying to find your way to, out of that kind of what for Me is a false dichotomy between, you know, that, you know, we do need to embrace personal accountability. And we all know if we're going to move our own lives forward, we have to embrace that level. And at the same time, we are brothers keepers. We're all in this together. We're one human family. So I'm wondering how. How you navigate all that maybe from the roots of your experience of being a black man, having grown up in America and having found your way into a little more conservative perspective.

Yes, well, you know, there's so much there and so much, and really I've been contemplating.

I just started a whole nother hour conversation. I apologize.

Let me see if I can give you sort of a concise sort of summation here. But you really are hitting something that I was just. Honestly, I was talking about this very subject just a couple of days ago at the Russell Kirk center at Hope College in Michigan. Russell Kirk being sort of the founder of the conservative movement. And what's ironic is that conservatism has its roots in deep commitment to community, deep commitment to honoring ancestry and our relationships to each other, mediated by institutions. The rugged individualism that has come to characterize, and I think you're right to say it, but the rugged individualism that has come to characterize so much of the conservative movement is actually a departure from the classical conservatism that Russell Kirk sort of himself represented in others. And that's really sort of the conservatism that I'm drawn to. And what's interesting, I learned a bit, is that Russell Kirk and Malcolm X had a good rapport between them. And Malcolm was, you could say a black radical. But Malcolm was also about sort of conserving the black community, the authentic sort of culture and heritage of that community.

And on the other hand, I also work with many liberals, and it sounds like you might have some sympathy with this, who feel that, yes, they have a commitment to community, but that they also feel like their individuality has been threatened by a tone and tenor of politics and many parts of the left that might reduce us all to broad based generalizations on the basis of our race, our gender, of our sexuality. Not that these things are important, but that they're a part of us, not the whole of us. Right. And that we are being reduced to, you know, to mere stereotypes. This is the way I find many people on the left now feeling, you know, as a consequence of a type of collectivism that kind of misses the nuance of much of the human experience. And so it's just to say that I find people on the right who feel that conservatives have gotten too far, far away from community, people on the left who feel that liberals and progressives have gotten too far away from the importance of individuality, which is just to say that, of course, how could be any other way, because this was a false divide to begin with. Right. You know, the individual is only truly him or herself in the context of community. And community is only truly rich and dynamic insofar as it stitches together individuals to become, you know, something greater than the sum of their parts, but who are still individuals. And so, you know, it's, it's, it's a balance, it's a oneness. And as far as that interacts with sort of, you know, my experience as a black Republican, you know, you're certainly right to observe that black Republicans are very, very often sort of maligned and socially ostracized. And that is the common experience. I'm sure I've gotten some of that. You know, I ran against maxine waters in 2000. I sort of stepped onto the stage, you know, being fairly, you know, fairly bold in that sense. And yet even in that campaign, I tended not to get a lot of abuse. Well, I could tell you some stories, to be sure, but, you know, overall, I didn't get too much of that. And to this day, you know, so many of my supporters, you know, possibly even most of them are people who are left or center left, although it's very diverse. But I've always been a person who has led.

With his values, with his beliefs, and with an overarching and explicit commitment to the good of whomever it is I'm speaking to. And I've always sort of centered those things as opposed to leading with my lateness, as opposed to leading with my party affiliation or even leading with my race or what have you, as something that perhaps automatically gives me credibility on a certain set of issues. And again, not because those things are not important, but because the deeper fundamental truths of my belief and conviction, my belief in love and goodwill as a transformational force in the fabric of society and something that can orient us more wisely around policy and politics that matters more.

And in leading with character and value and convictions and love and goodwill, I've found that I think that I've been able to sort of duck under some of the broad based stereotypes and condemnations that people might otherwise want to hit me with because they get to know me as a human being before they start to think of me too much as Merely Republican or merely a Christian or black person or mixed person or this, that or the other. And I do think that makes all the, that's made all the difference for me.

I'm sure it has. And somebody doesn't have spend more than a minute or two with you before I'm sure they're going to feel your good heartedness and your wisdom and your human humanity. So that shines through so beautifully. And you know, as I felt the political landscape shifting under my feet and you know, and, and almost feeling like I don't fit in the, in the clubs I used to thought I belonged to. Right. You know, and I found myself kind of in symbol. I've actually, and really I regret that I had those monological views in the past and the way I would have reacted to a Ben Carson or someone. I really regret that today. And I've been really grateful for voices like yours and Coleman Hughes and John McWhorter, Chloe Valdery and many others who are center left, center right. And I find a lot of the really valuable conversations were happening in that middle and I really would, I suspect and you know, I guess you'd really have to do some careful research. But even though it seems like, it seems like, you know, the what have always been on the more fringes culturally and politically of society is now dominating the mainstream through media, both social media and mainstream media. And it seems like the middle just disappeared, but I have no doubt that it's still out there and that the majority of Americans want to lead good lives. And you know, if somebody fans their fears and gets them riled up with misunderstanding.

Sure.

But I mean absent that kind of.

You know, I think most Americans really probably are in the middle somewhere kind of center left, center, center right. And sometimes I think our salvation will be the emergence of a truly more centrist party that could balance out our political spectrum. But obviously we've got a lot of work to do. But thank goodness for the work you're doing and that Brave Rangels is doing and really because I think we have to relearn how to talk to each other and how to be together.

Thank you for the good work you're doing.

Indeed. Well, it's my honor, it's my pleasure and it gives me the opportunity to engage with, with good and decent people like yourself and those who work with you at the Heart Mind Institute. I couldn't be more pleased to be in relationship with you all. So let us continue.

Okay, we will. Thank you so much. Be well.

Hello, it is Ryan and we could all use an extra bright spot in our day, couldn't we? Just to make up for things like sitting in traffic, doing the dishes, counting your steps, you know, all the mundane stuff. That is why I'm such a big fan of Chumba Casino. Chumba Casino has all your favorite social casino style games that you can play for free, anytime, anywhere with daily bonuses. So sign up now@chumbacasino.com that's chumbacasino.com no purchase necessary.

VGW Group void we're prohibited by law 21 plus terms and conditions apply.

Time is precious and so are our pets. So time with our pets is extra precious. That's why we started Dutch. Dutch provides 24. 7 access to licensed vets with unlimited virtual visits and follow ups for up to five pets. You can message a vet at any time and schedule a video visit the same day. Our vets can even prescribe medication for many ailments and ships. Shipping is always free With Dutch. You'll get more time with your pets and year round peace of mind when it comes to their vet care. Go to Dutch.com to get vet care that is always there for just $92 a year.