Your Undivided Attention - Mind the (Perception) Gap — with Dan Vallone

Episode Date: April 15, 2021

What do you think the other side thinks? Guest Dan Vallone is the Director of More in Common U.S.A., an organization that’s been asking Democrats and Republicans that critical question. Their work has uncovered countless “perception gaps” in our understanding of each other. For example, Democrats think that about 30 percent of Republicans support "reasonable gun control," but in reality, it’s about 70 percent. Both Republicans and Democrats think that about 50 percent of the other side would feel that physical violence is justified in some situations, but the actual number for each is only about five percent. “Both sides are convinced that the majority of their political opponents are extremists,” says Dan. “And yet, that's just not true.” Social media encourages the most extreme views to speak the loudest and rise to the top—and it’s hard to start a conversation and work together when we’re all arguing with mirages. But Dan’s insights and the work of More in Common provide a hopeful guide to unraveling the distortions we’ve come to accept and correcting our foggy vision.

Today, our guest is Dan Vallone, who's the National Director of More In Common, a non-profit organization that's been asking Democrats and Republicans an invaluable question. What do you think the other side thinks? Democrats think that basically that one in three Republicans support, reasonable gun control, it's closer to 65, 70%. Dan has a lot of data like this. Democrats thought that less than 50% of Republicans still consider racism a problem. It's closer to 75, 80%.

In technology, we often focus. on misinformation or on disinformation or on shared truth, but we don't even talk about our second-order beliefs, not our beliefs about what's true, but our beliefs about what other people think is true. Do we have an accurate understanding of each other? Less than 5% on either side felt that physical violence would be justified. Yet each side felt about 50% of the other side would justify violence.

Throughout Dan's research, he finds that we overestimate just how many people hold the most extreme views? Because we're hit with the double whammy. The people with the extreme views both participate more in social media, posting more, liking more, retweeting more. But they also, when they participate, they get more airtime, they get more reach, they get more surface area of the attention economy.

And who's the sucker now? If we're all sitting there arguing with what we believe to be the majority view on the other side, when it might be a much smaller percentage of those who actually hold those beliefs. Both sides are convinced that the majority, majority of their political opponents are extremists in their own kind of understanding, and yet that's just not true. The reason why I'm so excited about this conversation is that it unpacks two simultaneous crises happening. There is the truth crisis that we don't know

what is true and what isn't true on platforms, and there is a perception crisis that we are not even perceiving the other side correctly. And we cannot possibly hope to heal, to come together to find consensus if we cannot at least accurately see and hear those who disagree with us. And as a technologist, one of the most exciting parts of think of this interview is that while it is very hard to measure beliefs, are they true or are they not, it is very easy to measure beliefs about beliefs, whether we are seeing the other side accurately. It just involves polls, surveys, and that gives an objective measure for how well we're fighting distortion. I'm Tristan Harris. I'm Isaraskan. And this is your undivided attention.

Dan, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you. Really excited to be here and looking forward to talking with you. I think it would be really helpful to walk through some of the most powerful examples of what the perception gaps are. Which ones are the most harmful? Which ones are the most interesting? In the U.S., we produced a large report called Hidden Tribes,

the study of America's polarized landscape. And we had built off of that with our next. report, which you just referenced, called Perception Gap, which we released in 2019. So in our report, we asked Democrats, Republicans, and independents. We asked them about their own views, and then we asked what they thought the other side believed. And so we could get reality, and then we could get what Democrats think Republicans believe, for example.

And we asked a number of issues, so immigration, gun reform, but we also asked about issues like the salience of racism in America today. And from that, the top line finding that is most important in our mind is that on both sides, Republicans and Democrats, basically 55% think that the other side holds extreme views. So outlier views on any number of issues, when in fact that the actual number of people who hold what we might consider ideologically extreme views is more like one in three. So basically both sides are convinced that the majority of their political opponents are extremists in their own kind of understanding, and yet that's just not true. And subsequent studies

by Pew and others have kind of affirmed that that reality is very, very true, and it animates a lot of toxicity in our politics. The other perception gap that we released just before the 2020 election, we did a similar study design. So we asked people the degree to which they felt certain actions could be justified in the event that they felt the election was being stolen. We asked Democrats, we asked Republicans, we asked independents. And the actions were things like peaceful protests, confronting your political opponents online, confronting your political opponents in person, and then we included physical violence. Less than 5% on either side felt that physical violence would be justified. Yet each side felt about 50% of the other side

would justify violence. And so clearly, I don't, one January 6th was a tragic attack that underscore this is a reality that we face, it is also true that we are dramatically exaggerating the extent to which our political opponents are physical threats to our country. And that, again, is animating a lot of our politics. You actually wrote really eloquently in your report. I'm just going to read here, the larger a person's perception gap, the more negative their views are of the other side. People with large perception gaps are more likely to describe their opponents as hateful, ignorant, and bigoted. This points to a vicious cycle of polarization. the Americans who are most engaged in political issues and debates

spend the most time reading, watching, and listening to media that portrays the other side as extreme, further increasing their hostility and distrust and widening their perception gaps. When Democrats and Republicans believe their opponents hold extreme views, they become more threatened by each other, they start seeing each other as enemies, they start believing they need to win at all cost,

they make excuses for their own side cheating and breaking the rules to beat the other side, and as our public debates become more hateful, many in the exhausted majority tune out altogether. This is how countries fall into a deepening cycle of polarization and how democracies die. And I just think that was important to kind of have people contextualize. What is the feedback loop that we're worried about here? Because it's not just, hey, there's this static snapshot. It's that it leads to these self-reinforcing feedback loops, and we want to move from vicious

downward spirals into virtuous upward spirals. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. And this is why we feel strongly that drawing on what we know from psychology is incredibly helpful to navigating a polarized landscape. This is looking at work by folks like Karen Stenner who have been looking at authoritarian mindsets in that vicious cycle where we know that as an individual's sense of threat goes up. We retrench in terms of identity towards the identities that we feel the strongest sense of safety from, right? So we narrow our conception of us or we. And at the same time, we start to increase the perceived threat we feel from anyone outside of those groups.

And so that as we perceive our political opponents to be threatening, for example, I'm going to make my identity as a Republican or Democrat is going to become even more important to me, or it's my ideological identity maybe. So my identity as a conservative or a liberal or progressive, that's going to become more important to me over time, and it's going to cause me to see conservatives or progressives, whoever the other is, as even more threatening. We just had Shammal Idris from Search for Common Ground on the podcast, and one of the points he made in their 20-plus years of bringing people together to have conversation across difficult divides, the precursor to be able to have those conversations and begin any kind of healing process is the belief that the person on the other side is coming from a good spot. To me, this is exceptionally hopeful because Facebook, Google, Twitter doesn't have a way of ascertaining the truth of belief, but there's actually a really easy way of measuring the truth of beliefs about beliefs, which is the perception gap and whether that's getting worse or better and whether we're creating the space in which we can have conversations, find common ground, and then work together. It's really true.

And I think also just we tend to narrow our conversation to only talk about voters because that's who's most often polled. et cetera. But again, the biggest voting group in America are non-voters or or folks who don't vote regularly. And so the work that we've done has always identified less regular voters as being much more anchored in more realistic understanding of other people. So it's folks that they know that they work with. And so they might disagree. They might, they might even dislike, but they tend to understand the other people as people. And again, we come at it with a better approach in terms of the intent. So right after the election, we went out and we did a poll.

asking about sentiment, trying to better understand, like, how do Biden voters feel towards Trump voters? How do Trump voters feel towards Biden? For both groups, the number one sentiment most strongly felt, or most commonly felt, I should say, towards the other side was disgust, not anger. Anger was number two. It was discussed, which is worse, right? Like disgust is a more dehumanizing emotion. What was intriguing to us was at the same time, the number three, most commonly felt sentiment, was confusion. So it speaks to the extent to which we are misunderstanding the other side, and at least we are increasingly recognizing that we don't understand them. We might not know that we are exaggerating their beliefs, but we recognize

and like, I don't understand what's happening. And that itself could be an impetus to try and seek a greater clarity through conversation or other means where you can actually discover what people actually are feeling and what their true intentions are, because I agree, it's really hard to measure intentions. That's really quite hopeful, actually. It reminds me of in the film The Social Dilemma, when Justin Rosenstein, the co-inventor of the like button, says, you know, and then you look over at the other side

and you say to yourself, but I'm just so confused, how can they be so stupid? I mean, aren't they seeing the same information that I'm seeing? And then he says, the answer is that's because they're not seeing the same information that I'm seeing. But the confusion makes way for, as you said, sort of curiosity to try to figure out, like, okay, what is going on here?

You know, sometimes I look at what's going on as sort of a national couples counseling exercise where we are a, we're in a very bad relationship, and we, you know, look through the work of the Gottman's. They have this four horses of the apocalypse in broken relationships, and the four horses of the apocalypse are contempt, stonewalling, defensiveness, and criticism. And I think, you know, we're knee-deep in some of those attributes of these relationships. And I think we're going to have to pull from all sorts of disciplines to figure out what are the recovery modes from relationships that are in vicious spirals, and especially when you have these specific ones, what are the kind of answers to some of those emotions?

Absolutely. So there's a group out there called Braver Angels, which actually brings together explicitly red and blue groups, and their model is anchored in marriage counseling. And so theirs is very interpersonal, but I also really like how you framed it as curiosity, because I do think that's one of the most exciting opportunities in the technology space, is how can we figure out better ways to activate and then manifest people's curiosity? Because I feel like alongside of confusion and curiosity is motivated reasoning, which is I think oftentimes what gets acted on when we engage in social media or when we engage online, we are

discovering content that presents the other sides in ways that feeds whatever misperception I already hold. If there were ways that we could introduce the curiosity kinds of component, we might find ourselves meeting each other in unexpected ways that allow for that kind of discovery process. at the end of the day, like, people have to persuade themselves. So we can convey this information as much as possible. We can say, look, we're exaggerating our differences. A person actually has to have that process where they convince themselves that that's true and arrive at a different worldview through some sort of process.

I'm tempted to ground some more of this and some examples for listeners so that they have more examples of perception gaps. I think it was a Florida State University study that Republicans estimate that about a third of Democrats are LGBTQ, when in reality it's actually only 6%. And Democrats estimate that over a third of Republicans earn over $250,000 a year, like there are these rich, wealthy, you know, Republicans, et cetera. And in reality, it's only 2%. But I was wondering if you could just give more examples, be the optometrist here and help us correct our lenses of each other. Yeah, absolutely. There's two things that I did just want to know that we also think about when we have these kinds of conversations.

whatever side we're on, we also misunderstand our own side. You know, the New York Times did an analysis of our hidden tribes data. And what they found was basically that if you look online, so if you go to social media, the most progressive Democrats are overrepresented two to one relative to the more moderate Democrat. More moderate Democrats are the majority of the Democratic Party by far. And yet they are much less likely to share content online, much less likely to post content or engage in it. they're also much more diverse, lower income, lower education level.

And the same thing is true of Republicans, right? Like, that's not a democratic phenomenon. It's a phenomenon of a polarized landscape. So we consistently exaggerate our own side and what the median position is. What that does in terms of our perceptions on the other side is it forces us to see the other side is the most extreme version. So I think take the salience of racism. We ask people the extent to which they believe racism is still a problem in the U.S.

And we ask, do you think the other side thinks that? The Democrats thought that less than 50% of Republicans still considered racism a problem. It's closer to 75, 80% Republicans still considered racism a problem in America. We asked about gun reform. Similarly, something like Democrats think that basically that one in three Republicans support, reasonable gun control, it's closer to 65, 70%. So in a lot of key issues, there actually is a lot more common ground than we conceive. the other thing that we found really interesting when we were running the perception gap study was education and media consumption don't help. In fact, they likely hurt. So as we ran the regression

for education levels, we found perception gap increases as you go from high school graduate to two-year college to some college to four-year graduate to post-grad. So folks with a graduate degree had some of the highest perception gaps of anyone that we sampled. I think could you slow down to give more on this one? Because I think this is a critical fact It's so counterintuitive, right? You would think that people with higher education, with higher degrees, would be better at, like, examining their own mind and saying, oh, I've got these biases. Maybe they've studied psychology, and they will be less likely to fall into sort of this outrage

economy or something like that. But what I hear you saying, and the data reflects, is that actually the more education, was it also just, I think there's some ways that this falls differently on partisan sides, right, the Democrat side versus the Republican side with education. Yep. Yeah, it's fascinating seeing that Republicans are sort of flat, the more education does not affect your perception gap. But if you're Democrat, the more education, the more your perception gap.

So, yeah, please detangle. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So we, you know, we did this perception gap study and then we ran a series of regression analyses to try and understand like, well, what are we finding as relevant factors to understand this? And so we looked at education. And to your point, the Republicans in our sample, the magnitude of their perception

gap, the degree to which Republicans exaggerate the views and attitudes of Democrats, stays flat as you increase in education level. So as you go from high school graduate up to post-grad degree. For Democrats, it increases almost in a linear fashion. The Democrats with the most accurate understanding of Republicans' views and attitudes are those who have a high school degree. And those who have the largest perception gap are Democrats who have a postgraduate degree. What we also found strongly correlates with both perception gap, the size of perception gap,

and education level is social group homogeneity, right? So the degree to which your friends have similar ideological views increases almost in-step function with education level among Democrats. And so there is this particular phenomenon where going on where the assumption is that education should instill in individuals a desire to be more rigorous in their views of the world and to kind of discover reality as best they can, particularly in politics. And yet that doesn't seem to be happening. It seems that we are building social groups that are very reinforcing of our own worldview. and allowing that to fuel what we think of as the other side. There is an interesting finding for Republicans, which is media consumption.

Republicans are more likely to have in their social group or interact with people who have a different ideological view. But what we found very predictive of Republicans in perception gap is the degree to which they consume media. Could you, yeah, say more about that? Maybe talk a little bit about how the different media sources affect perception gaps. Yeah. So, I mean, in general, if you ask the question,

how often do you consume news? and that's a pretty standard polling question. People who are more active news consumers had higher perception gaps across the board, which just kind of underscores the degree to which people are consuming media that reinforces their particular worldview. But when you look at kind of cross-posting of links,

you can very clearly map out media ecosystems and what we consider conservative media. So Fox News being the kind of hub, but by no means the entirety. So this is things like One American News Network, Newsmax, Dredge Report, Wall Street Journal, Daily Wire, they're all reposting within each other's orbits, right? So they're not drawing on links from like AP or Reuters or from CNN or NBC, or they're drawing on them much less frequently, I should say, more liberal-leaning media outlets tend to have

greater diversity in terms of the links that they're cross-posting and sharing. And so the media consumption is less strongly tied to perception gap magnitude if you are consuming liberal media, basically. It's interesting because I heard you say earlier that, you know, essentially the more educated you are in the Democrat side, the less likely you are to have relationships across different groups. But on the Republican side, they're more connected to people of different political persuasions, et cetera.

But then in the media ecosystem, this is different. So now in the Republican side, you have less cross-linking. And on the Democrat side, you have more cross-linking. But would people say, yes, maybe it's more cross-linked, but the media in general is so liberally biased, that is that really a valid measure? It's really interesting because you do find, again, people who identify as a public and a conservative, even though we have geographically sorted ourselves pretty tightly, there's still a lot of the political tension is arising in areas where it's actually, there's still

a lot of intermixing. People do engage with each other, either it's work, or that tends to be where you see flare-ups in our politics is where they're still, whether they're purple states, their swing states, etc. But we did this study in December called the American Fabric Identity and Belonging. As part of that research, we asked about the extent to which you feel like particular media sources have a bias towards people like you. And what we found was that liberals feel as if conservative media has a bias towards them. Conservatives feel like liberal media has a bias towards them. There is also a feeling among conservatives much more strongly felt than among

liberals that there is a bias amongst conservative media towards people like them. Only about about 10% of liberals feel as a liberal media has a bias towards people like them. It's closer to 40% among conservatives. There is the sense that the media itself is a defined set of institutions that has a bit of a bias towards folks who are conservative. The other kind of theme that we're trying to better understand is are we seeing shift towards even more tight identification with individual personalities? So it's actually less about the platform and more about the person. I'm reminded also of Yochai Benkler's work, who is one of the co-directors for the Brooklyn Klein Center at Harvard, and he split the media ecosystem into two chunks. It's sort of like the right and then the rest, and in the right, you sort of win points by agreeing with each other.

If you like, you step out of line, you sort of win points by shooting somebody even down on your side, sort of like rhinos is a good example. And on the left, you win points when you can scoop someone and be like, ah, you didn't get your source right. you didn't get your fact right and just thinking about your work in the perception gap of your side to your side. I hadn't been thinking about that, but that perception gap, it's sort of like you have two camps and every time one person tries to walk from camp A to camp B, like the degree to which you misperceive your own side's beliefs is the degree to which you're going to snipe down that person trying to walk across the other side. Absolutely. And it speaks to that perception gap within people's sides. It's really relevant to recognize the degree to which people feel

pressure to conform their beliefs and how that might inhibit people, as you said, from trying to reach out across the side or create in-group pressure to punish those who do. You know, we used to have this fairness doctrine that in television you would try to represent different sides of each issue fairly. And it struck me that, you know, there's been this ongoing dialogue within the tech reform community about what would a fairness doctrine look like for social media. And then people would think, well, we would need to make sure that each of these individual voices or channels would be representing both sides. But it actually struck me that a networked fairness doctrine for social media would be like, wait a second, what is the

democratic representation of all the voices? So right now we have an anti-democratic, we have a very unfair representation where we're only hearing both from the most extreme voices because they share the most. Then we also have the extra self-reinforcing feedback loops of they dominate all the airtime. So we have two layers of unfairness or anti-democratic representation, and it would be interesting to think about how we can use measures of perception gaps to try to create something like a more democratic view of ourselves. And I think what's interesting is that the tech companies are in an interesting position to do that measurement, because they actually get the bird's eye view. I was reading through your work, and, you know, I think the study that you did

had 8,000, 10,000 type participants, but I'd be really interested if you could run that with the entirety of, you know, a city, a town, a county, a nation, you would have the most accurate perception gaps on the national level. And of course, we would need to trust a Facebook or a Twitter to represent and to store that information because it's very sensitive information, but it would actually give us a shared object to point to because imagine Twitter had a page called, you know, perception gaps, and you just saw these little graphs or charts of where we were missing each other and where we were missing our own side. And then we could actually share those and actually have conversations about we actually agree on this, we agree on

this, we could actually have conversations that the foundation of them would be where we agree, where we do have common ground, would be where we are actually misperceiving each other. And so we'd be able to point to shared objects. And that's a service that the platforms could almost be democratic fiduciaries to our countries to help provide that as a service. So I love that. And I think it's so true. And I think we've noticed a challenge that a lot of groups who are trying to think about

how do you reduce polarization or get back to a healthy polarization away from affect to polarization. And there is this inclination to have a kind of both sides approach, which makes intuitive sense to a lot of people. But then if the sample from what you're drawing your two sides is disproportionately consisting of folks with more extreme ideological views, you're going to misrepresent the entire picture. Whereas if we could have this more platform approach, we actually did think about like, whoa, wait a second, who is sharing and who's active and not active and how do we elevate the perception gaps? So much healthier. So much of a more accurate story that we can then build from.

Yeah, this area got me also really excited as starting to read through your work because, as I saying before, it's very difficult to measure whether something is true or false, right? And in almost all conversations around content moderation or myths or disinformation, the conversation ends up being around, can we tell whether this thing is true or false? And if it's false, let's try to downregulate it. And what I love about the perception gap work is here is the way that we can measure tangibly that Facebook could do the polls or Twitter could do the polls consistently and understand,

okay, we don't know whether the beliefs are true or false, but we know whether our beliefs about the other side's beliefs are true or false, and we can measure whether that's going up or down. And if it's going down, we're getting closer to be able to have actual real conversations. You know, an example from your work is the difference in the way that Republicans estimated Democrats believe that most police are bad people, right? This is like defund the police. When the left hears it, they hear, like, refund communities, take one away from the police.

When the right hears it, they hear, just get rid of the police. And so it's interesting, right? Republicans estimate that only 48% of Democrats would disagree with most police are bad people. But that actual number from report is 85%. And, like, if there is that almost 40% perception gap, like, you can't sit down and have a conversation. because you always think the other side's coming from a kind of bad faith. So imagine if Congress legislated came up with some kind of protection where every year, Facebook or any of the social media platforms had to publish the perception gaps along these

sort of effective polarization metrics, most important metrics, and say like, cool, you guys are going to be taxed or there's going to be liability for if people use their platform and the perception gap increases. And now imagine that those perception gaps as core metrics get pushed down so they're sitting right alongside all of the engagement metrics that the project managers and people getting bonuses are measured on decreasing the perception gap. So at the very least, these perception distortions go away. And that got me really excited because that's something we could do. That's something we'd start measuring right now. They could do that right now. I also got excited about that. It's just

like we could put a price on carbon. We could put a price on polarization. And it has some nice alliteration. So that'll hopefully stick. No, yeah, absolutely. And I think because not only there's it then engender healthy market forces among like platforms and other technologists who can build off of that and construct interesting better tools right like i think we also as a lot of like a lot of the field that we work with we lack a lot of insight into like well let's take facebook and it would be fascinating to better understand how perception gaps kind of manifested if you could better understand also like are there facebook groups that we seem to be doing a really interesting job of actually like facilitating a reduced perception gap across some of these important fault lines and like if so

like what are those what are they doing like what's happening in those Facebook groups because right now like you said you introduce a topic like immigration or police the conversations just seems to be immediately taken over in ways that are completely unhealthy to actually arriving at like a better discourse and a better understanding of each other but if we could better understand like what's happening in these groups and how can that how does that map against perception gaps all of a sudden the toolkit universe becomes so much more robust and powerful yeah i mean Facebook, Twitter, they're forcing these goggles, these glasses on to people. As we think we're becoming more informed, we're actually just becoming more distorted in our

perceptions about the other people that are all American, are all part of the same community. And we can measure that distortion. That's what your work does, which means we can reduce it. And you didn't find a causal link necessarily, but this very, very strong correlation, that the more your increase in consumption of media, the worse that perception gap gets, Well, that's obviously the thing we need to decouple. We need to have it go the other way. Ideally, in some world, you know, not that we want some just like maximizing of

consumption of media, but the more you are on social media, the better your perceptions should be. And I think reading through your work, are you familiar with the Murray-Gelman effect? No, I'm not, no. This just came to mind when going through it because one of my favorite author is Michael Crichton, growing up reading many of his fiction novels. He talked about the Murray-Gelman Amnesia Effect, and this is, he describes it as follows, which is, and this has happened to anybody who's ever had news articles that are written about them in a

newspaper. You open a newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, it was physics. In mine, Michael Creton's, it was show business. You read the article, and you see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often the article is so wrong and actually presents the story backward, reversing cause and effect. I call these the, quote, wet streets cause rain stories. The papers are full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement, the multiple errors in a story, and then you turn to the page to the national or international affairs section, and you read it as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read, you turn the page and you

forget what you know to be true, which is that there is this distortion. You know, having been the subject of various articles or news stories and seeing how often things are off by quite a long way, even when they're doing fact-checking, right? And it struck me this is very interesting because One of the problems with even being aware of perception gaps, even though it's incredibly helpful, is it's a very momentary kind of experience. Because if I open up Twitter right now as we talk, I will be presented with things that will make me feel very depressed about the state of politics, right? And even though you just inspired me by saying, hey, there's actually many more people

who have more reasonable views than the extreme positions that are seen, it's very hard for me to hold on to that feeling because I'm still trapped in a mind, meat, suit, body with emotions and cognitive biases that when I see those things, I will again have a kind of amnesia. So this is almost like the perception gap amnesia effect, that even though I'm aware of it, I will still fall into this trap. And I just wanted to honor that and take that in for a second

because I think it's important we realize how the limits of our perception, we really do need instrumentation. I want Twitter to actually be fixed. So it doesn't reify my amnesia. Instead, it corrects reality to actually show itself in a more accurate way. Yeah, absolutely.

It's hard to sustain a post-intervention understanding of the other side. And it gets even worse in our estimate because the current ways in which social media in particular, but media more generally tends to elevate the voices of folks who are more extreme in their views, it causes individuals who don't feel that represents their view to want to withdraw more, right? So we've asked consistently over time, like how exhausted are you from political division? And the less extreme you are, the more exhausted you are and the less likely you are to actually want to engage. And so there is this even worse effect in play that is causing people who might otherwise nudge conversations in healthier directions

to just say, like, I'm done. And I don't want to participate because it depresses me. It makes me feel like I don't belong. And that's really concerning from a kind of healthy democracy standpoint. And it is addressable. That's the other thing is the platforms could make things differently such that those individuals felt a greater inclination to not just participate, but I actually feel their participation is rewarded by influencing the shape of discourse.

When you say that, it makes me wonder, what would make them feel safe to share? Because as you said, and as we know, the more extreme the views are of your side, the more likely you are worried that your own side will shoot you down for saying something more moderate in a context where everyone appears to be saying something extreme. I'm just thinking, you know, at a practical level, there we are with Facebook or Twitter and we're making design decisions about how it works. What would create the safety for someone to veer out and say, well, here's actually this more soft, reasonable position and knowing the safety in numbers. This is why I thought even literally I mean, I'm just literally spitballing here, but having the graph or some kind of shared object that is, you know, Twitter sharing, here's literally the shape of how many people actually hold that moderate position so that they're essentially arming you with the rhetorical ammunition, not to use war metaphors, but, you know, the kind of a view, they're providing and supporting and facilitating the moderate to go from being invisible to visceral, we have another statement with humane technology, which is that humane technology tends to make the invisible visceral. And I think that's what we need. We need to be

able to see this invisible and also feel it viscerally, that there actually is a more reasonable center. But we've all been wearing these confused glasses for so long that we, you know, we have to kind of snap out of that trance. Absolutely. I think the visibility part, and this is like, again, it's what we know from, even if you're offline, like what are the conditions in which an individual feels as if their voice matters within a group, it's, its representation, its acknowledgement, it is identifying that there are others who feel a similar way. And so if they could make that sentiment visible, it would go a long way towards addressing these concerns around, like, well, I'm going to get punished or I'm just, I'm actually alone in this opinion when,

oh, wait, I can see actually. I'm like, oh, no, I'm right there in the median or the average. And so we give that confidence and sense of belonging, which I feel like is so lacking in a lot of these spaces right now. Another thought that just hits is when I think about content, I'm like trying to imagine what kind of content would drive up perception gap. And I'm like, well, the first thing in my mind is things like clickbait, any of the kinds of articles you say like this politician slams that politician or this politician admits finally to this kind of thing. Like all of that kind of low quality content, I wonder if you imagine being Facebook and doing large scale studies where

you're tracking millions of news feed, all the content going through it, you're doing studies such that you can tell whether populations and individuals are moving up in the perception gap or down in these specific kinds of perception gaps, then correlating it to which kinds of content is creating perception gap. And then over time, penalizing these sort of perception distortion pieces of media, my hunch is that a lot of the clickbait mis and disinformation would sort of be correlated with this kind of distorted worldview. And that gives a really interesting countermetric potentially for how to promote the content. and the people that are helping each other see each other more clearly.

Have you done any research like that? That's such a great question. So not on the scale or, I mean, I think what you described would be so fascinating and the platform should absolutely do that. And because it would be, I share your hypothesis around the clickbait. I also think that it's probably true that content, which again reinforces a perception of one's own side in a way that is inaccurate would also be correlated pretty strong. with perception gaps because it's that same thing like it's a pulling you towards a more extreme

conception of one side so we haven't done that what we have done is more we've done small-scale tests on again like more focused group kinds of activities and it's really i mean it's a difficult moment because not so there's perception gaps which is function polarization and all that there's at the same time we this is and it's again these are their causality here i think is those multiple ways, but there is massive distrust in systems, right? So, like, if you were to ask people, do you think the system is rigged against people like you, you would get like 80% across the board. So we have massive distrust. We agree on that. We have common ground on the rigged. The richness of the system. Yep. True across party, true across the country. It's sort of like

Bernie and Trump are basically operating with the same diagnosis. Like, yeah, the thing is rigged. It's not really working for people, but then there's very different directions about where people interpret those facts to mean and what would be necessary to fix it. Absolutely. And I think that it it makes things more challenging because people feel as if there's a system at work against them and that they're trying to be either played or persuaded. So a lot of the content test that we found is like you've got to get content moving that people can welcome because it doesn't challenge their world view initially, but yet doesn't provoke that sense of being played or manipulated. So it's it's very difficult to do. That's why some of these, we'd be better at this if we could get

access to data and insights and observe kind of like what's working, what isn't working. We found success, I think, again, taking conversations out of politics is always a better step, but not excluding politics. Like you need to situate an identity group, basically. The content and the test that we've done, small scale, that have been most successful around, can you cultivate an identity group where, again, you're bringing people together around, we leverage, you know, psychology findings, and say, look, let's have a conversation around, not something political like climate change, but something like land and resource management,

or recycling even, like things that are very proper. that are like hands-on kind of conversation, and that you can actually start people to engage with each other, and they're not primed in their ideological where system is rigged identities. They're primed as like, oh, hey, we're people who all like to recycle or like to do home improvement activities, and all of a sudden you just change the entire nature of the conversation, and you can over time introduce political conversations, but you've like defined the parameters in a different intervention. We were talking yesterday about rules of engagement.

There are certain kinds of things you can say in a court. There are moves that are allowed and moves that are not allowed. And you can be like objection to your honor. So I thought you, Tristan, you might want to like introduce some of that idea. And I have a follow on once you go there. Yeah. Well, and this also made me curious, Dan, to ask you more for some examples of what that content looks like that tends to do this positive thing. Like you said, people don't feel played or persuaded.

And maybe some examples of that would be later helpful. But, you know, on this idea, this comes from our mutual friend is in mind, Daniel Barcai, who has really said that there's different kinds of conversational spaces in games with different results and different goals. So, for example, in science, there's a goal for truth-seeking. And we actually care about both figuring out what we currently believe to be true that isn't true. And we actually create a competition where you can win. You're with more prestige by disproving something. And you can win by actually showing that there's a current understanding that's actually inadequate. There's even a better understanding or another theory that might be better. And you can win with that game.

So science is that kind of game. The courtroom is another kind of game where we're trying to figure out something, but because in each of these games, there's a lot of the line, we create rules, like what can and can't be said. And one of the problems that we always end up with in social media land is these endless debates about free speech versus censorship, which really are never going to lead anywhere. Like, I just want to be really clear, because you just end up rehashing the last, you know, 300 years of debates about what speech can and can't be said. And everyone, it's just a matter of which, how many law books have you read to kind of unmask all that. What's the most interesting about this proposal is that you've made here, and these metrics that

would be completely objective, right? Because it's not about, like you said, whether race is a problem or isn't a problem in the United States. I can't measure that if I'm Facebook. They can't hire content moderators to do that. If they try to moderate it with content moderators, they end up in this further accusation of, hey, your fact checkers are biased.

What we're talking about here is actually finding more objective ways to measure our misperceptions. And the fact that that, you know, when you think about the platforms which are currently doing this tuning, right? So they are, if you want to negatively or cynically describe their behavior, you could say they're shadow-vanting people. And this just annoys a certain community of people

because they believe that these tech platforms are rigged against them with intention, that there's somehow this mustache twirling, you know, Dorsey with his big beard, you know, twirling that big mustache around, trying to, you know, like specifically suppress certain kinds of voices. And my experience and understanding of the tech companies

is not that at all, that there's this Frankenstein that they've created. They have basically no more accurate way of essentially tuning the dials except using these very abstract classifiers, like, oh, you're using, keywords like Q and on or whatever, and they start doing this kind of dialing up and dialing down, and it makes a lot of people angry. So they don't have a good measure to do this shadow banning

or sort of this diminishment and upregulation and down regulation in a way that we would call humane, fair, or ethical that's not going to fall into this lens of they're persuading or they're playing some audience or another. What we're talking about here is a classifier that could say, hey, given this Facebook group or given this news feed with these kinds of stories for this population, imagine this town or this city or this state, we see that the perception gaps went down when they were shown this kind of content, and it went up when they were shown this kind of content. And then the machine learning classifiers can actually learn patterns that figure that out

in a quote-unquote objective way because it's through the inner subjective perception gap reduction. And I know we're kind of looping around the same point, but I'm almost like, you know, slamming my elbow into the arms of my friends at Twitter and Facebook and being like, guys, like, this is something you could really implement right now. and I think that they should hire more in common and the rest of the Braver Angels and other folks in that community to start working on all these initiatives

because I think everyone really is struggling to figure out what will help here. And I wanted to add one extra thing because we mentioned this Murray-Gelman effect. The Murray-Gelman amnesia of, you know, the thing gets printed and has errors and we forget that. In that case, newspapers have errors or noise, but it's all in unpredictable directions.

It's not like when newspapers publish something, they always get it wrong in the same way. Whereas in social media, it's very important, and this is A's point, not mine, when we talked yesterday, that social media is actually getting it wrong in very specific predictable ways. It's always showing us this more extreme version of reality. And so there is something predictable we can say about the kind of optometrists sort of shift. So we have to go from wearing these outrage-sided glasses

to kind of bringing the focus into this constructive common ground. Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the elements of that kind of approach is also the cost is borne by all of us, but also the platforms. Like, there's no doubt that as perception gaps increase, it fuels, again, like the algorithms operate with directional impact, but the costs towards the platforms are significant here. And like you said, they're both placed in untenable positions, but obviously it foments all kinds of challenges from a policy standpoint, from a competitive corporate standpoint.

And so trying to build that and arrive at this objective approach to assessing impact of content along meta perceptions would have massive, massive benefits. And I think also reorient the conversation about tech more generally in a healthier direction again. Like it would be less about whose side they are on and kind of putting some numbers and data behind it. So totally agree. I would echo that strongly. And we are familiar with a lot of like tech startups that have, I think, great, great intentions to try and address perception gaps. But the scale is what matters here in a huge way.

And they can't get that until you have millions and millions of users. Right. Well, it also, you know, what I get excited about, and I honestly, it is really quite exciting, which is that you could do this at local levels, you could do it at community levels, you could do it at state levels, you could do it at national level, you could also do it at the world level. I mean, you could talk some of your work, Dan, and more in common is actually about between different countries' responses to COVID. And actually there are places where we actually want more collaboration on things like climate change. We want more collaboration on things like COVID. And if we could, you know, Facebook and Twitter could be the global fiduciaries for seeing global cooperation.

and imagine something like a UN-like body with some kind of democratic representation from different countries could name what is the agenda of topics that matters, that we would want to minimize those perception gaps at that international level. And these companies would actually be willing in a position to minimize those perception gaps too.

So again, they could become the global coordination infrastructure for creating common ground, for enabling better discourse, for enabling less of the extremes and more of the moderates, for reducing these norms that if you veer out of line from your own part, party, you get killed. They really could be flipping the whole thing around. Not that I want to be

a techno-utopian, but just it's such an exciting prospect that we already have the infrastructure. It's currently harming all the things that we care about in terms of all these dimensions of politics. But here's a specific measure that might do it. And I think specifically I get excited about people think they can't agree. And I'm in California right now. What are we going to do about the fires coming next year? What are we going to do about business recovery? If we could show there's much more agreement there too, that's also just incredibly exciting to see that fractally happening across all these different places. Absolutely.

And we've seen from partners that we work with, now I'm kind of stepping back and talking about some of our global work, but there is this massive, I want to call it a sideline effect, where because of the nature of social media in particular, a lot of institutional players are very hesitant to engage constructively in any number of issues. So conversations around refugees in migration, around climate change, around any number of issues, which we know, in fact, there's a lot of appetite for greater coordination, collaboration, etc.

They're very hesitant because they don't feel. feel as if their community, however they define it, is with them on that. And a lot of the work that we've done is, you know, we've used survey methodology, like, look, actually your own community feels pretty strongly. There's these tension points. Let's help you navigate these tension points. But then we've helped actors in the faith community, for example, become much more active in healthier narratives around refugees and migration in Europe, conversations around religious diversity in Europe. It opens up and really nudges this silent effect to be much less detrimental to the kind of societal level cohesion.

What I hear you saying also there is just that this warping effect, these perception gaps affect politicians who have to sell. It's like, why do all politicians suck? It's like, well, because they're all trapped in this position of having to cater to what they see is these extreme audiences and they're getting confused. So the mind warp has a scrambled reality for all of us, not just the base, the citizens, the public, but actually also those who are supposed to respond to those needs. And so we're getting warped at every level.

The pithy way of saying that is, you know, the math. is not the territory, but our map terraforms the territory. What we believe the map says about the territory is how we go out and start to build and we shift the land and then that becomes reality. And so the extent to which we have these perception gaps is in part the extent to which we become more like what we think we see. I wanted to add another few dimensions on how much Twitter and Facebook and Instagram are kind of the opposite of this right now. I've been reflecting on this because I've given some talks at a couple of schools recently, which I actually don't do that often. And one of the things that, you know, in high schools, teenagers are kind of

facing is these kind of drama snowballs. Like if you think about the moments of drama in our lives, and this is going to apply politically in just a second, right? If you're on a freeway and someone cuts you off, like they're, you get really upset with this person, right? But then there's a momentariness to that drama. It's not like the rest of your day, you're just obsessed for like the next two hours. Or like we take that moment and we broadcast it to millions and millions of people. But these moments of drama with social media are made permanent because then it gets trapped in this object, which then gets broadcast to way more people. And then there's the Twitter, in case you missed it in the last 48 hours, here's all the drama snowballs that

would have just been momentary, you know, someone passed someone else in a car on a freeway. And now we actually like show all the times that everyone's getting passed in the freeway by all these, you know, horrible people all the time. And so when you just really like wrap your head around how opposite to this whole experience we're talking about right now is, we We don't just have little moments of disagreement, but we actually are doing the opposite of inflating them, putting sort of growth hormone in these sort of moments of discussed, drama, contempt, anger, outrage. I liked earlier to your point, you talked about kind of the rules that we construct and there's

different like domains of court versus we oftentimes think about stories that people are running and like, who are the characters in the story? And in person, you have people that you might disagree with that. You might even in your story are like the bad guys or the antagonists, but you have protagonists with you and the antagonists don't dominate your role. your lens online, it's just not true. You are continuously presented with folks that you are pushed to identify as the antagonists in your story, the story that you think is kind of your arc of your narrative of life. And in that construct, you're continuously pushed into like

a fight or flight, winner die dynamic, which sustains this negative cycle. Let me see if I can lay out an idea. This is the first time I'll be saying it out loud. So I reserve the right to retract. But we were thinking about like what are the peacekeepers online? We were, as I said, talking to Shammal Idris, and they have this incredible corpse of people who are very good at being those intermediators. The problem is, of course, the scale of all the conversations happening online. Those are in the billions, and then you take Metcalf's law, and the number of interactions between them goes up as the square of the people that are involved, and it seems almost impossible, and so you're like, well, that's not a scalable solution, but I'm remembering something

that the Huffpo did a long time ago. I know Tristan, you and I have talked about this, to scale up the norms of a community is that inside of any particular community, there were a set of moderators, just doing their thing, moderating, and then you as a user, if you were, you were allowed to flag and do moderation, but it didn't have any real effect. You just sort of like indicating what you thought was the right thing to do. And over time, if you were statistically aligned with the norms of the actual moderators, then you would be leveled up until level and moderating. you could start to have some powers. And then if you continue to do that over time,

you'd be level up to a level two moderator. And you would actually start to be able to, like, ban people and block conversations. What I liked about this is that it was a way of taking the norms of a small group of people and sort of very quickly and transparently scaling it to a much bigger community. And if, you know, those moderators that had been leveled up started to, like, abuse their powers,

well, they fall statistically out of line and those powers get taken away. And so the thought in my mind was, oh, could we do that to create a Peace Corps where you have people that have gone through the training, done the work, are really good at going into high conflict conversations, into those drama balls, de-escalating them, but not have it just be them, having it be per community, per norm, per country, per county, and then scaling those sort of in their local domains in this kind of statistical manner. Yeah, I think, well, and search for common ground has done an incredible job. And then we do know a lot about how to moderate conflict scenarios based upon work in any number, you know, Colombia and other kinds of settings that have successfully, to a certain degree, reduced perception gaps, reduced polarization and social hostility. I think a key finding from our research has consistently been people respond well when they

see people like them elevated into both messengers and people of authority. There's a very interesting dynamic where we accept and have a lot of confidence in, for the most part, the concept of a jury, which is like people kind of randomly selected from your peers, assign tremendous responsibility, and responsible for adjudicating, like, oftentimes very complex scenarios. And there's something interesting about the model of where, could you imagine people also being almost like randomly selected for being responsible for the nature of a conversation on a social media chat room or kind of group. and how that might affect their own psychology to go from, oh, I'm like a passive user, to all of a sudden I have some sense of responsibility, I might, and if I want the platform conversation to better reflect the views of people like me, and I'm also working with some other moderator who might have a slightly different ideological view, that's the kind of intervention that we lack too much, where people have any kind of incentive to grapple

with, like, how do we actually have a healthy dialogue where both you and me feel appropriately represented and reflected. I can see how that's starting to mix some of the ideas of inclusive stakeholder and skin in the game with the ideas of deliberative democracy. So you have small groups of people that have invested stake in the outcomes of conversation and community getting involved and having real power to make those communities work. Yeah. There's a really interesting dynamic where there are teams, for example, in Germany, there's a lot of private and a lot of public investment in those kinds of exact interventions where for a variety of reasons, there's different kind of governing structures. But the state, the German state, is very invested

in trying to figure out how do you cultivate healthier, more democratic conversations online and community building online with a kind of small de-democratic orientation. And I think we still are very much in the infancy of all that work, but it's exciting to think that there are those kinds of interventions being tested. So part of this, what's happening is we have to figure out a way in which a digital open society out-competes digital authoritarian societies. Right now, it appears to be the case, and this is back to our podcast interview with Audrey Tang, the digital minister of Taiwan. With the exception of Taiwan, it feels like when a democracy goes online in sort of the social media

version of that democracy, it devolves into chaos, extremism, and conflict. That's the current impact of that. Whereas when a digital authoritarian society goes online, it's like, how do you beat China without becoming China? We don't want to become China. So what is a vision of a digital democratic society in which we have almost a hyper finding of common ground, a hyper finding of where we agree on what to do, both locally and nationally and internationally?

Because one of the things that struck me was if you had this map being presented to policymakers, so as part of this, you actually see where are all these places that people agree and are actually the hidden concerns that are not well represented. You have all sorts of ways of surveying this kind of thing. but this really could be an infrastructure for listening, for actually creating more of a listening society. Again, you would have to trust that this is done in a democratic way, and I frankly think you would need different people.

Just to be really clear to our listeners, I don't think that Mark Zuckerberg or Chris Cox or some of the leadership of Facebook or Jack Dorsey should be the ones who are doing this, but they have created this infrastructure that maybe some other democratic body can sit on top and have access to those controls would have to be elected, would have to be trusted with that information,

and has to be used for good purpose and that helps to get worked out. But we're looking for a way in which when you consider the game theory of we have Western democracies which are currently devolving into disagreement and chaos and nothing ever gets done and the gears get locked,

that's the current model. We have to find some model in which this is actually out-competing, digital authoritarianism. And it seems like we've kind of danced around some of those areas, which is incredibly inspiring. I mean, looking at some of your other work as well,

you know, where people, you know, look like they disagree and you have these maps of actually, but they agree on this, you know, one example from your democracy for president.com, I think was your other work before the election. When you ask people, is voting by mail secure, and 85% of Democrats say, yes, it is, and we should vote by mail, and only 28% of Republicans believe that we should vote by mail, but you say 64% of people trust their postal workers and believe they're deserving praise for doing their job in a pandemic.

And I feel like if we had this map that almost reroutes us, like, you know, in HTTP, what is it, the 302, the, like, you know, you go to one website. and reroutes you to something else. It's like whenever we start veering towards one of these polarizing frames where it looks like we're about to just get into an argument, there could be a, hey, by the way, here's how to like navigate someplace where we actually agree. And I feel like social media that is enabling those forms of interaction, that's like almost like a good nonviolent communicator facilitator, a good couples counselor, a good marriage counselor.

They see where you're going with that thought and you're about to, you know, say something that's really unproductive and they kind of reroute you and say, let's go over here now. that might sound authoritarian to some people, but I think it's much better than the kind of brainstem chaos that is dominating our politics today. I absolutely agree. I was also trying to think that there are other key points on that. But I think that's really right. And there's governing institutions that we need to think about, how do you have credibility without confronting the exact same challenges that we are currently faced, which is like the massive levels of distrust. But those are surmountable, I think, challenges in terms of we can find credible people

who have credibility and there's processes like elections and other that people, still have confidence in that we could imagine being done here. And I think it is key that in thinking about a healthy democratic digital space, that it not be overly reliant on, like you said, hyper fine tuning, but there are broad parameters that we can agree on. Like, look, exacerbating perception gap is an objectively measurable effect. And we all can agree that it has costs. And so we should seek to reduce the frequency or exposure of those kinds of content and increase the exposure of content or other media that seems to correlate or be associated with lower perception gaps.

There's an objectivity, and then I think it creates the market forces within these platforms and users, et cetera, that just would be much healthier and give us a lot more of a space to think about how to do things differently digitally online versus, like, I totally agree. It's like there's chaos or there's China, and it's like that can't be the binary that we're confronted with. Like, that just can't.

Exactly. Well, and as you said, I mean, it's a win-win for the companies because right now the sort of infinite content moderation, whackimal game and is it disinformation to flag this or this or that is very different than reducing perception gaps and which is a totally uniform place to be and they can do that objectively. They don't have to hire the content moderates.

They don't get the pressure from outside. It would just lead to a more coherent, more harmonious kind of popular view. You know, imagine Twitter goes from the platform where everyone can speak with a megaphone and just blast out everyone else to, no, it's a platform where everyone can hear each other. And like, imagine the world when we can actually hear each other. It reminds me of the Tim Wu line that when the First Amendment was created,

it was in an environment where speech was expensive, it was expensive to get your content out. Now we're in a world where speech is cheap, but hearing, listening is expensive. And so to me, this switch to a set of metrics that are objective that let us hear the other side is the antidote. I love that. And just earlier, I think you had asked, like, what kind of content we actually use? And one of the most effective content, and this is, of course, like, super intuitive, but it speaks to exactly what you said. It's authentic questions, like asking people.

And then listening to them is the thing that more than probably any other particular line of content deescalates and creates a space. If it's authentic and it's a question and it's actually seeking not just like, what do you believe about this, but actually like, huh, you're kind of like, why or even like what in your life is like, what's going on? Tell me a story about it, the backdrop. That is actually what is very powerful in alternate conversations, but you can't scale that. But the solutions that we've just been talking about kind of has the same effect. And it's such a powerful concept to think about.

I hope the platforms take this seriously. Overall, in your work, I mean, I feel like that's the idea of a listening society is what you're talking about, the idea of hidden tribes in America, that, you know, we don't just have the left and the right. We have these eight tribes, the progressive activists, the traditional liberals, the passive liberals, the politically disengaged, the moderates, the traditional conservatives, and the devoted conservatives, or excuse me, that's seven. Am I missing one?

No, there's seven, yep. The seven hidden tribe, excuse me. But the idea that we're not listening deeply enough, we're kind of hearing a scrambled message. We're hearing a noisy station, and this is like, how do we tune the dial so we can actually hear? And overall, that just leaves me feeling inspired about, you know, your work and hopefully a collaboration we can help you set up with tech companies to implement. some of this because I'm just literally chomping at the bit to say how can this, you know, at least be experimented with really, really soon. Absolutely. I totally agree. And people want

that too. I think the miss is just too often on elevated is like people really want a listening society and we can approach it through any number of lenses, but that is what people want and would act on, I think, if we had some adjustments to some assistance factors, which the platforms are uniquely positioned to do. And so much of where our politics seem broken right now is the feeling of people feeling like dignity is not, they are not seen, they are not listened to, there is no dignity for them. The society isn't paying attention to them. And I think listening society is a really good way to put it. And it actually, again, references the work of the Matter Modernist Movement and Hansi Frynox book, The Listening Society, which I want to

still recommend to listeners. Yeah. On that point of dignity, we'll be publishing some data soon on this point, but we asked folks about experiences of dignity at home, at work, in your neighborhood. and there were variations at home, work, neighborhood, primarily around race and economic status. Then we asked about dignity in terms of how people like you are represented or depicted in media and TV. Everybody dropped. Everybody. Everybody feels. And so that that lack of feeling dignity and how we see each other and see ourselves presented is pervasive across the board. And it speaks to the fact that a listening society is so much healthier and so desired by people across the political spectrum. I love that.

Dan, I just think it's been such an awesome thing to have you on the podcast and the work you're doing and so many others, greatest conversations, braver angels. Everyone in this space is so critically important and just hope that everyone takes what we've shared to heart. Really appreciate that and couldn't agree more and appreciate all the work that you all are doing to elevate these conversations and looking forward to collaborating with the broad swath of folks who are trying to make the change to how we see and how the mirrors operate in our society. What can people do if they, you know, listen to this and they want to learn more? They can visit our Perceptiongap website, Perceptiongap.us, and there they can see the findings, they can download the report, and they can kind of engage in this material with a greater depth and hopefully continue their involvement. So we really care about these podcasts leading to real change, and we're trying something special.

We'll be hosting conversations with podcast guests or their close allies after most episodes, there'll be a chance to connect directly with the people you've heard here, the CHT team, and others around the world working to advance humane technology. You can find out more at humanetech.com slash get-involved. Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Our executive producer is Dan Kedmi and our associate producer is Natalie Jones. Nor al-Samurai helped with the fact-checking, original music and sound design by Ryan and Hayes Holiday,

and a special thanks to the whole Center for Humane Technology team for making this podcast positive. A very special thanks goes to our generous lead supporters of the Center for Humane Technology, including the Omidyar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, Ball Foundation, and the Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, among many others.