Shaylyn Romney Garrett

Welcome to The Puck, Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that explores the evolving landscape in the venture capital world. We'll have candid conversations with today's VCs and entrepreneurs who are shaping those changes. I'm Jim Bier, the managing partner of Bier, Negron, and Troff and the president of CMEG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. The thing that we need to realize is that we have to start really small.

We have to start exactly where we are, right outside our own doorstep. So that means if there's somebody living across the street who has a political sign in their yard that you don't particularly like, instead of writing them off, you need to figure out a way to work with them in some way. On today's episode of The Puck, we take a deep look at some of the social, economic, and technical factors contributing to the increase in polarization. I'm thrilled to be sitting down with writer and speaker, Shailene Romney Garrett, co author of The Upswing, How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again. This book was released in the first year of the pandemic and already is set to become a classic.

Shaylyn shares her insights for how we can begin to reconnect with one another as a society and the dangers inherent when we resist understanding the other. Welcome Shaylyn Romney Garrett to our podcast. We are very excited to have you. As we get started here, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background? Sure.

It's a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate the invitation, and I'm looking forward to this conversation. So I am a writer, a social entrepreneur, and I sort of like to think of myself as a change maker because I don't like to write just for the sake of writing or analysis, but I like to write to inspire people to think differently about how they can act in the world and how we can work together to make change. And so I've got a varied background. I've had a career in the nonprofit sector, working mostly in grassroots nonprofit work in various different places.

I've also started an organization working to catalyze social innovation amongst young people in The Middle East. So I spent a good chunk of my career, six years, working in The Middle East. I'm a returned Peace Corps volunteer, and that's actually what took me to The Middle East initially was volunteer service in the Peace Corps. I'm a big believer in national service, and so that's also part of my story. And it was after those two years of service in the Peace Corps that my husband and I stayed and founded a nonprofit and continued some education work during the Arab Spring.

Since coming home from The Middle East, I've really refocused on my career as a writer and most recently have published The Upswing, How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again in collaboration with Robert Putnam, who famously is the author of Bowling Alone. He's been a long time mentor of mine. This is the second book that we have collaborated on. We wrote another book together with Dave Campbell, another scholar, and that was called American Grace, How Religion Divides and Unites Us. So religious communities are something that are very interesting to me.

And I think the through line in everything that I've done in my career has been really trying to answer the question of how can we bring people together and what is the power of that for solving some of the bigger problems that we see in our society. So I think a lot about community. I write a lot about community. I've done a lot of work to build community in lots of different settings. I'm particularly fascinated about people who are working at the very fringes of experimenting with community, things like intentional communities and things like that.

So, yeah, mine's not a straightforward story, but it is one that I think is focused on one of the biggest problems we have today, which is the problem of the lack of connection. As we talk about the puck and where the puck is going, we've used technology to see where the world is going. And one of the things we're doing is also looking at where the world in general is going and this whole notion of I, we versus I, we going back to I, and how do we get the world to pivot where the puck is going from I back to we. So before we jump into that, can you tell us a little bit about the upswing? Sure.

So the upswing starts with the question, how did we get here? Here being this multifaceted crisis that I think it's no surprise to anyone that we are in the midst of as a nation. And what are the dimensions of that crisis? Well, we look at four in particular in this book. The first is economics.

We are at historic levels of income inequality. The gap between rich and poor has almost never been wider than it is today. And separate from that, although, ultimately, we argue it's not that separate, is political polarization. We are at historic levels of political polarization. There has been no other time in the history of The United States other than the civil war itself when America has been more politically polarized.

And on top of that, we are also incredibly socially isolated. When you look at our society, the fabric of our society, our civic infrastructure, as well as just our personal connectedness, we're extremely lonely, extremely atomized, extremely disconnected from our families, from friends, from neighbors, and from associations that we know from the work of my coauthor, Robert Putnam, are the lifeblood of democracy. And the fourth dimension to this is cultural. We have never well, maybe not never, and we can talk about that in a minute, but we are at historic levels of cultural narcissism, cultural self centeredness, which is really just the belief that it's every man for himself. And I need to be focused on, you know, what's best for me looking out for number one.

And, you know, everybody else is on their own, as opposed to the idea of cultural solidarity that we're all in this together. We're working together towards some common goal, and we prioritize culturally ideas and behaviors of togetherness. And so these four dimensions, economics, politics, society, and culture today, basically mean add up to us being in a very eye focused moment. Right? We're fighting politically.

We are incredibly individualistic, socially, culturally, and, you know, we're in a kind of winner take all economic moment as well. The question of how we got here really sent professor Putnam and I on this search for the story of the twentieth century of in America. Anybody who's familiar with Robert Putnam's work will know bowling alone, and bowling alone looked at one of those four dimensions that I mentioned. It looked at society, looked at our civic infrastructure, social connections, social capital. And Bob really documented the fact that over the past half century, social capital in this country has been in stark decline.

But the story is bigger than that. And by zooming out to look at all of these four metrics and also a longer time horizon, the entire twentieth century rather than just the last half century, what we see is that America has been here before. This is not the first time that we have seen this confluence of these four very difficult crises. America was in the same boat during the last Gilded Age, the turn of the twentieth century. Right after the Industrial Revolution, We were also at historic levels of income inequality, historic levels of political polarization, social isolation, cultural narcissism.

And just as today, commentators of the day were decrying the end of democracy. All is lost. We've descended into plutocracy and tyranny. The American experiment has failed. And yet, none of those doomsday prophecies were fulfilled.

And on the heels of that difficult moment came what we call the upswing, a moment when by hard measures, hard statistical measures, all of these four phenomena that I'm discussing started to move in the right direction. And America entered a multifaceted, multi decade upswing that lasted for the first two thirds of the twentieth century when year upon year, we were getting less and less polarized, less and less unequal, more and more connected, more and more focused on what we can accomplish together. So we started off the century in a very I moment that looked a lot like today. We climbed into a moment that was much more focused on we that peaked in the nineteen sixties when to an astonishing degree and in an astonishingly coordinated fashion, all of these trends took a downward plunge, landing us back again in the eye moment that we're in today. So we've come to call the twentieth century based upon this data and these statistical findings, America's I, we, I century.

So that's a bit of an explanation in terms of, you know, broader explanation that I think we're often used to hearing about how we got here today. And it's also sort of a hopeful narrative that says, you know, we have been here once before. We got out of this mess once before America. We can do it again. Maybe a look back to this earlier era of history that looked so much like the America we're living through today might be instructive.

And that's the story of the upswing. You know, I'm a big fan of the upswing. I've read a lot of books that deal with some of these issues. They do come at it from their own perspective. So you've got Capitalism in the twenty first Century that talks about it from an economic perspective.

You obviously have certain books that are talking about the social issues and the cultural issues. But the question is, you know, what's unique about the Upswing is that you did pull it together from all four perspectives. I'm curious, if you look at the movement from I to We that you talk about after civil war, you talk a lot about these influential individuals and this upswing that seemed to take place in the late eighteen hundreds, the early nineteen hundreds. But then, you talk about the reversal in the twenties. And unfortunately, at least from my perspective, it was the Great Depression and the wars that got us back on track.

We then said, okay, we've got our better angels now. We've got this upswing. You could then go through the sixties and all the optimism through the sixties, culminating, unfortunately, in the loss of that innocence with the assassination of John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. And then you go into the Vietnam War where we had a draft where we were supposedly all in it together. We've got kind of the deferments and all the issues and all the cynicism that comes out of the Vietnam War.

Then Reagan comes along and says after the terrible seventies and stagflation, big business is gonna fix it. Right? We've gone from government's gonna fix it to big business is gonna fix it. And now we're back in this situation where Ayn Rand and libertarianism and all this other stuff seems to have failed us. And now we're left with scratching our heads and saying, okay, we tried it one way.

So what is the way, Shailene, to get us back to we? Well, so you've given a pretty standard narrative about the twentieth century there, which I have to take issue within a couple of points before I can answer your question. Great. So I do think that it's a misrepresentation a bit of our data to say that we think that the depression and the wars pushed us into the upswing. And that is the standard narrative about the twentieth century.

So you're in good company with a lot of historians in putting forward that narrative. However, again, the upswing is a data based story. And when you look at the curves, you look at the trends, America started moving in the right direction long before the Great Depression and actually before World War one. So before the wars, before the crisis of the Depression came onto the scene, America had already righted the ship and was moving in the right direction. Now there is in the data, as you mentioned, a pause in the nineteen twenties.

In almost all of these curves, you can see there was an upward trend that then slowed down during the twenties and then resumed again. So there was that moment when the stock market really boomed, the rich got a lot richer, everybody else didn't. So that that movement in the direction of equality was paused, and that was the most dramatic pause we see in the twenties. And that was reflected a bit in the other curves as well. But if you look carefully at the chronology of those charts, they actually started to climb in the right direction before the Great Depression really hit and before the New Deal.

Again, we we have this idea that it was a New Deal, and then it was the war that really pulled us up and out. And to an extent, you can see in the data that the World War two accelerated what was already an upward trend, but it is very important to note that many of these curves were already on their way in the right direction as early as the eighteen nineties, the nineteen tens. Well, you have to ask the question then if it wasn't a crisis that helped us find our better angels, what was it? And we really focus on the progressive era and the individuals who drove that movement in America as being critically important to fueling and and really setting in motion the upswing. It did start, as you point out, before the depression and the stock market crash, but the twenties did take place.

The '20 seemed like a real eye, period. And what I'm saying is that, yes, we corrected, but then we went back to a narcissistic period, and what got us out of that narcissistic period was something. Right? And you're saying it's not the depression, it's not World War two, but how did we get into the twenties in the first place? Where am I wrong there that the we slowed down or was reversed by the twenties?

Well, you're not wrong. However, that pause in the twenties looks different depending on which phenomenon you're looking at. Okay. And the most dramatic reversal was in the area of economic equality, which makes perfect sense because, again, the rich got a lot richer during that stock market boom, and everybody else wasn't keeping up. And so that gap between rich and poor, which was narrowing before the nineteen twenties, grew for a short period and then started shrinking again.

But it started shrinking before we implemented the new deal. Got it. When I'm speaking about the progressive era, I'm talking about the progressive era that preceded all of this. I mean, the progressive era is generally believed to have ended with World War one. Right?

So when we're talking about the progressive era, we're talking about 1900 to 1915, that era in American history right at the turn of the century. All of that progress that we see in the upward initial stages of the upswing happened during that progressive era. So would you say that we're starting to enter a new progressive era now? Well, I don't know. I mean, I think there are signs moving in both directions.

Right? And to be clear, you know, a lot of people will ask us, well, when did the Gilded Age end and the progressive era began? Like, what was the year when it all turned around? And of course, history is a lot more messy than that. So when we're looking at that earlier period, there were a lot of forces pushing us in the right direction, but there were a lot of countervailing forces continuing to push us in the wrong direction.

And I think that that's the moment that we're in today. I mean, I think political polarization has not abated in the slightest. Right. We are extraordinarily polarized. It feels like we couldn't get any more polarized.

And then every day, another news story comes out about how on yet another astonishing metric, the parties can't get along. And so do I think that we've entered another upswing? I definitely think that there are signs. For example, during the last upswing, one of the major components of this progressive era was youth participation. So many of the progressive reformers and I wanna just pause to clarify.

When we're using the term progressive in the historical sense, we're talking about capital p progressivism, which was a bipartisan, widely diverse movement. It was more of a cultural movement almost than a political movement. In 1912, at sort of the peak of the progressive moment, all three presidential candidates were jockeying for the title, who's gonna be, you know, the progressive candidate. I'm the progressive candidate. No.

I am. Right? So we're not talking about progressivism the way that it's used today. Today, we talk about small p progressivism, which is leftist politics. Right?

The left end of the political spectrum. K. So when I'm talking about progressivism as being the source of this upswing, it is not the same thing as what you would think of as progressivism today. That's incredibly important to make clear. Right.

So when you look at the progressives historically from this period of the nineteen hundreds, nineteen tens, they were really young. Most of these people who were creating change in their local communities and ultimately became leaders of a national movement were in their twenties when they started doing their most important work. And some of the highest voter turnout in the twentieth century in that youngest age cohort was in the nineteen twelve election. And so today, you know, we've seen in the last election incredibly high youth voter turnout only rivaled by that previous period. So are we entering another upswing where youth are activated again to get into the public square and be be change makers?

Possibly. I mean, look at who was leading the protest movements of 2020. Look at who, is leading the charge for climate change and for school shooting advocacy and all of these sorts of things. It's very young people. And so I think that there are some encouraging signs there.

So youth was a major part of the last upswing. There were other components. One was the thought that the progressive era was very much a moral awakening in this country. There was a strong cultural and moral shift away from that hyper individualistic ethic. It's all about me, social Darwinism, only the strong will survive and the devil take the hindmost.

That was the prevailing ethos of the Guild of H. And into that moment came the social gospel movement, which was a movement that really began to question that hyper individualism and say, is this really true to our core values as religious people, as Americans, and ask people to move in a direction of a more we focused culture and ethics. And that actually turns out to be one of the biggest components of this story, because that looks like the variable that turned first. We have all these curves that started moving in the right direction at the same time. Well, you might ask yourself which one was the leading trend.

If we had to pick a leading trend, it was for sure cultural, a cultural shift that encouraged people to abandon that highly individualistic culture and move into a more we mindset. And that's a really important part of that story, and I think that we see that again. Look at these young activists today. They are not afraid to put a moral framework on what it is that they are talking about. Greta Thunberg is out there saying climate change is a moral issue.

This is just wrong, what we're doing to the Earth, what we're doing to future generations. That's a different way of talking about that issue. It's not just about economic trade offs. Right? It's about morality.

And that was what we saw during the last progressive era and during the last upswing. So are there signs of hope? I think there are. Are there a lot of problems that are still deepening and darkening? There are.

And I think that that's, you know, the last point I'll just make here is that we tend to look at the twentieth century and just think, well, it was history that changed us. It was the great depression that came along and helped us find our better angels, or it was the war that came along and forced us into solidarity. Right? We love that narrative because what it does is it makes us not responsible that we are moved by history, not that history is moved by us. But the clear story of the upswing, particularly when you look at the progressives who were working in the progressive era, there was no vast crisis.

There was no war that caused Jane Addams to go and start a settlement house on the South Side Of Chicago. She did that because she felt that it was time to change. And so the strong message of our book is really that we have agency as democratic citizens. We are not the victims of history. We are the creators of history.

The progressives really embrace that mindset and that narrative, and it was a major driver of turning things around. And it can be again today if that's what we choose. So I love the way you frame that, and I too am an optimist, and you talk about a youth oriented movement, and I think the youth are the future. I also think the young people today are angry at the boomers for kind of loading them up with debt and not dealing with globalization, and basically taking away the American dream so that they feel like they are locked out of the system. How do we get the young people back to this feeling that the system is not rigged against them, that character does matter, and their values do matter?

But again, you can't have hypocrisy. Right? As a technology lawyer, we talked about where the puck is going and there's all this focus on decentralization. How do we get back to that middle way approach where, yes, we're talking about individuals, but we also are all in this together. I mean, that's the million dollar question.

Neither my co author, Bob Putnam, nor I believe that the solution to hyper individualism is hyper communitarianism. Right? There has always been a balance in the American narrative, a balance between liberty, the ability to self determine on the one hand, and the need to work together in order to make a democracy function. Famously, Alexis de Tocqueville, who visited The United States in the eighteen thirties, a French aristocrat who came to observe the American experiment in action in the eighteen thirties, he coined the term individualism. That's often not remembered about him because generally he's viewed as the patron saint of American communitarianism.

Because what did he describe seeing? All these remarkable ways in which Americans came together to solve problems and to work together. And he grappled with this idea that here on the one hand, Americans were committed to liberty so much so that they fought a war over it, and yet they also were engaging in a remarkable amount of mutual aid and and cooperation and collaboration, and he coined a term to describe that balance. And that term is self interest rightly understood. The way that he explained it was that what he was seeing in America was people who understood that essentially we all do better when we all do better.

And that sometimes in order to rightly understand my liberty and my self interest, I need to understand that what's best for all is actually in the long run best for me. And so I think sometimes we create this zero sum game between liberty and cooperation and collaboration when in fact, and I think the virus is the biggest object lesson in this, you know, COVID is the ultimate object lesson in if we would all make a small sacrifice, then we would all be better off. Our freedom is actually less curtailed by wearing a mask than it is by having an ongoing epidemic that won't end. Right? But some of us in this argument are so fiercely committed to this hyper individualistic, hyper liberty based argument that we're forgetting the need for collective action to solve problems.

Your question was, what's the solution to this? I mean, how do we restore the balance between individualism and communitarianism? How do we get more people to think about the we? You know, I think one of the lessons from the progressive era is that we really need to invent new ways of bringing people together. What I mean by that is, you know, the progressives, they lived through the industrial revolution.

They were young people living in an entirely changed world from the world that their parents and grandparents had lived in. Their parents and grandparents had lived in small towns and on farms. They'd worked in small businesses run by people that they knew. And then in one generation later, you had millions of Americans who had migrated to big, busy, anonymous cities. You had millions of immigrants showing up on our shores.

Everything had changed. And so the barn raisings and the quilting bees and the small church communities that had held people together just didn't apply anymore. And so in this era, the progressive era, you had the invention of the rotary club. You had the invention of, you know, a 100 different ways of bringing people together for a changed circumstance. And, ultimately, the progressives, when you take the Rotary Club as a great example, the Rotary Club was actually founded in Chicago by a young lawyer who had migrated to Chicago from a small town in New England, and he was just lonely.

He just needed to meet people. He was feeling personally that measurable sense of isolation that you can see in all the graphs that we have. And so he decided to invite a few colleagues to go to lunch and to form a lunch club. Initially, he was just trying to create a new way of connecting with people to meet his need of connection. But over time, he recognized that as he could bring people together, he could not only meet his own need for sociality.

He could begin to serve in the world. And so over time, the rotary club develops this motto of service above self. I think it's really interesting that when you bring people together to meet the needs and assuage the loneliness that is such an epidemic today, as it was back then, I think people also learn that they can work together to solve problems. And that's where we begin to focus not just on meeting my need of feeling less lonely, but on then turning outward and meeting the needs of others who are experiencing that same problem and a 100 other problems that we can solve when we work together. It's interesting because as you're talking about groups and clubs, I think of social media.

Because when we have things like Twitter and Facebook, originally at least, the thought was that people could then more effectively create communities and groups and communicate with each other. Unfortunately, because of all the postings, I mean, the analysis seems to be that it's led to the exact opposite phenomenon, which is that everybody feels lonely because when they go on to these sites and they see what their friends are doing, they feel like they're missing out. I'm wondering if the young people of today can essentially, by understanding that these are tools, instead of letting the tools control them, use the tools in a more productive way. It's like I remember fire, right? It can be used to cook food or it can be used to burn things down.

A gun can be used to protect yourself or it can be used to shoot somebody and start a war. Can we use them in a smarter way, for instance, to bring people together? Oh, absolutely. Technology is not going away. Right?

I mean, it's not like we're gonna say, oh, social media was bad. Let's just delete that entire factor from human history. I mean, obviously not. Right? And so the question then becomes, how do we become the masters of these tools rather than these tools and technologies mastering us?

And really what's so fascinating about the progressives was that they were faced with that same issue. One of the most famous progressive texts that comes out of this historical moment is called Drift and Mastery. It was a short little book written by a 25 year old named Walter Littmann who published this book in 1914. The main philosophical premise of the book is this. We have a choice.

We can either be the victims of history. We can drift along. And at the time, he was referring to the industrial revolution, just sort of drifting and carrying us into this highly unequal divided America, or we can master the moment. And that's the beauty of democratic citizenship is that you are actually empowered as a democratic citizen to become a master of the fate of the nation. And I think that when we talk about social media, that's exactly what we need.

We need young people who are not just going to say, oh, I'm the victim of this horrible platform that has abused me and used me. Yes. It has abused you. But there comes a point at which you have to say, how do I get in the driver's seat of this? And I believe digital natives, our youngest people, they are the ones that are gonna carry us out of this mess.

As you mentioned earlier, they didn't create this problem. They didn't create any of this. I mean, if the graphs in our book are to be believed, these young people today, myself included, were born into a world where year upon year, everything got worse. Almost everything in our society, measurably so. Not just sort of like, oh, aren't things awful?

You can measure it. Right? And that's what those graphs where everything is plunging downward teach us. So of course, they're cynical. Who can fault them for that?

They've inherited a fundamentally broken world. But I do think that in the last upswing, what happened was those very same young people in the very same situation as today's young people, they looked around and they said, how do we harness all of this change and make it move in the right direction? And they did it. And that's the inspiring story of that period of American history. And so, yes, I absolutely look to our young people who have every right to be frustrated and to be cynical, but they're the ones who are gonna have to master these technologies and create the ways for this to be a life giving human invention and not one that destroys us.

I wanna go back to something. I agree with that completely, and that makes a lot of sense to me. I wanna go back to something you said, which was that you were in the Peace Corps. And when we talk about the sixties and Kennedy, I was very young, but I remember the whole focus on asking not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, and there was this whole sense of collectivism. When you look at the volunteer military today, you look at the young people today, I don't think people are naturally narcissistic.

I think people do things that, in the moment, serve them what they perceive to be well. People are are looking out for themselves. How do we have dialogue with the young people of the day and let them know that ironically, that through collectivism, through volunteerism, through sacrifice and partaking in things like the Peace Corps and national programs, that it actually can bring them that happiness and also bring them that material prosperity as well? How do we create that optimism? Yeah.

In a sense, I am one of these young people. I mean, I I joined the Peace Corps after the Bush years, after watching what happened in Iraq, right, and really feeling this sense of disillusionment about America. What is America doing in the world? We're just wreaking havoc. And and my husband and I, you know, really chose the Peace Corps because we wanted to experience being a part of something that our nation was doing in the world that we really believed in as a response to this sense of disillusionment.

And that changed everything for me. I mean, being outside of The United States, being in a country that did not have a free press in a country that was struggling to democratize, that had an economy that, you know, those based entirely on international aid. I mean, it just gave me a whole different perspective on how grateful I was for American democracy. You know, my mini sermon to young people would be to channel that disillusionment and despair into something that you can believe in, whatever it is. You don't have to, you know, have somebody else dictate to you what it is that you should do, but find a way to serve.

I actually think that one of the biggest movements that I'm hopeful will ultimately take hold is the national service movement in this country. I think that giving people a way to giving them a pathway to service is one of the most important policy priorities for this country. And it's interesting because, you know, the Peace Corps is really underfunded. It's really under recognized. Everybody who's a military veteran gets all of this amazing accolade, like they've done some service for their country and anybody that served in the Peace Corps, it's like, oh, that's cute.

You know what I mean? I mean, there's a lot that we need to do culturally to begin valuing and shoring up this idea that service is an incredible part of being patriotic. Serving our nation takes a multiple different forms, not just military service. And the more that we can create those pathways that are compensated, that are supported, and that are supported by a national narrative, right, around the value of service, I think that that can be really transformative for young people. Because the other thing that we know about service is one of the best ways to build social capital amongst unlike groups.

The best way to bridge difference is actually to get people working on a shared project. So often you'll have this experience coming out of people who join AmeriCorps. It's like all of a sudden you've got people from all over America thrown into, you know, a core that are working on disaster relief. And all of a sudden, they overcome biases about different parts of the country, different people, different religions, different races, because they're in the trenches working side by side with those folks. And so I really think that there's a lot to be said for national service as a way out of polarization, as a way out of isolation and loneliness, and as a path toward meaning for our young people who I really think are experiencing a crisis of meaning in this really difficult time we're living through.

From a statistical perspective, is there a movement back towards national service right now? What what are the numbers show? Oh, there definitely is. I mean, it's not necessarily about statistics. It's more about an advocacy movement trying to make this a policy priority, which is interesting because right now it feels like there's no policy that is bipartisan anymore.

Except national service is largely a bipartisan. Both parties support this idea that we should get young people into service, that we should fund that and support that. That has been something that has been revived in the Biden presidency is a lot of talk about national service, a lot of thinking about how to reconfigure the agencies that oversee national service. There's a hope that with some of what's going on with the Green New Deal, right, that creating sort of civilian conservation corps type of experiences for young people today. I mean, I think that there's some momentum there.

Whether or not it's gonna get through the most polarized congress in history, we don't know, you know, whether that's gonna live to see the light of day. But you would think that national service is actually something that parties could agree on. It would be an interesting thing to get through as a way to unite America on multiple different levels. I'm wondering also that part of getting out of a fishbowl is knowing you're in a fishbowl and and also not feeling as lonely. I remember when I was in law school and I looked to my left and I looked to my right and I realized everyone was kind of afraid to raise their hand except for that one or two people.

I'm wondering if you look at the Industrial Revolution, the country is moving really fast and each generation goes through this. If you look at the acceleration that's going on with technology now and Moore's Law and everything else, we're moving at a really fast pace. And you look at globalization and all these other things. And I wonder if part of educating the young people is recognizing that this is always the case and that it feels always too fast for some people and that part of this is helping people understand that change is inevitable and that the conservative notion that we just things want to stay the same and the progression knows that, you know, we wanna move faster. But somehow getting people to talk to each other and cross the aisle, What about fostering people to just go talk to their neighbor and talk to somebody that's the other and really start to understand what their fears and concerns are?

For sure. Part of what's so overwhelming is definitely the pace of change. Absolutely, a 100%. But another aspect of that is the idea that we're always because of kind of the consolidation of national media and the death of local media, which are two huge phenomena right now, It's been a documented fact that Americans in their political perspectives, but also in other ways, are much more nationally focused than they are locally focused. And what that does is it fosters a sense of things being out of control.

Right? If every problem is a national problem, well, I can't do anything about a national problem. It's like, what do I do about national service programs? Well, that's a great idea, but it has nothing to do with me. Right?

However, I am able to serve on a local level. I don't need a government program to do that, which is exactly what you're saying. And I think that this was, again, this was another key piece of the progressive movement. It was an incredibly grassroots change movement. So it was people who said this industrial revolution has changed everything.

There's millions of new immigrants. Like, what am I gonna do about this? And they actually just decided to start engaging with people who were different than them and building those bridges and those associations. And I think that, you know, we're in a moment now where we really have this habit culturally to be looking for something outside of ourselves to provide the pathway to change. When I think that we have all the equipment we need, the thing that we need to realize is that we have to start really small.

We have to start exactly where we are right outside our own doorstep. So that means if there's somebody living across the street who has a political sign in their yard that you don't particularly like, instead of writing them off, you need to figure out a way to work with them in some way. Work with them on a community project that has absolutely nothing to do with politics. Take a loaf of bread over to them. Try to engage them in a conversation that's not about politics.

That's just about neighborliness. I think that those things go a long way farther than we think in solving a lot of these problems. As we're talking about the individual versus the collective, I often get into the situation where the micro leads to the macro. You have a foundation and the stronger the foundation, the stronger the building is. The stronger the individual, the most balanced a person is, the more balanced their family is gonna be.

And then there are societies. And so when we want government to fix everything, the government is just an amalgamation of us. And in that regard, I'm wondering, there seems to be this huge movement in, for instance, in marriage counseling where when the couple comes in, instead of saying he or she is wrong, think about this in the terms of political, Democrat versus Republican. What a good therapist says is, we understand you see the world with different subjective realities. Your partner is not gonna be the same as you.

But the question is the following, is the marriage worth saving? Can you agree that there's a common value? We have common rights in this country, the Bill of Rights, but what are our common values? What does America stand for and are we, the people, willing to listen to the other person, understand their subjective reality because of the greater good, which is the values of America? Do you think there's room for a dialogue about common values that can help bring individuals together?

Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, I think it's a fraught conversation, mostly because we have a pretty well articulated set of values as a country that we haven't lived up to. And so most of the conversation around America's shared values right now is about how we've not yet lived up to any of the values that we've put on paper. And I do think that that's a valuable conversation in the sense that you can't move forward until you know where you've been and until you're willing to be honest about what's gone on.

I mean, going back to marriage counseling, when there's been a betrayal of trust, you have to talk through that, but you can't live in that space forever. Do you know what I mean? I mean, you've gotta find a way to acknowledge the failings and the breach of trust, but you've also gotta find a way to heal that breach of trust. And so I think that when we talk about shared values, for sure there needs to be a conversation to kind of reestablish some sense of that. But part of that conversation actually has to be a conversation about how do we heal the breaches of trust that have been created when America has fallen woefully short of its own ideals.

But again, going back to my experience as a Peace Corps volunteer, when I felt betrayed by America, instead of saying, you know, I'm gonna just become an expat and move away. Like, I'm going to Canada. You know, that could have been a choice that we made. But we decided to do this experiment, which is say, is there anything that America is doing that I can really get behind? And let me throw myself into that for a minute and see if I can rediscover what America is about.

I think there's a lot of power in that. If those of us who might be a little bit disillusioned about America not living up to its core values, can we find something that we do believe in? Danielle Allen, who is one of my favorite constitutional scholars, and she's just brilliant and super articulate about this stuff. She talks about mucking out the stall of democracy, and there's a lot of horse, you know what, in that stall. Right?

But underneath it is a diamond. And if we're just gonna push it all out, we're gonna lose the diamond, which is this democratic experiment. The first experiment in human history of creating a mass multicultural democracy. Can we do it? That's the diamond.

We can't sweep it out with the muck. We've got to do the work to clear that away to heal the lack of trust that is a big part of the American experience today, rightly so, but that can be healed. I mean, I do believe in the aspirational narrative America. It's not fashionable today to believe in utopian narratives and aspirational narratives. It is much more fashionable to believe in dystopian narratives and to spend our time wringing our hands about all the ways in which things are going to fall apart.

But I really think that it's true, you know, what it says in the book of Proverbs that without vision, the people perish. We have to rediscover that diamond. We have to rediscover that vision of what it is that we're working toward together. Because I think therein lies the power for us to be inspired to do the hard things that we're gonna have to do to get there. I wanna go back to something you said.

I mean, first of all, you remind me, we are of different generations. Because when I was young during the Vietnam War, for instance, in that whole period of the sixties, there was this whole notion of better dead than red, and there was also democracy is the worst system in the world until you look at the alternatives. We got a long way to go, 100%. We are, as you said, this experiment in multicultural democracy and we are the first one in the history of the world. We have everything in this country and this is, to me, an unbelievable experiment that's never been done before.

Instead of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, sometimes what I wanna say to young people is, look, we messed this up. I grant you that. We made a lot of mistakes. But coming back to you when you talk about our values and the feeling of values, is there a more moderate way to frame that where it's not that we failed our values, it's that maybe we have to reframe them and focus on what we've done right, but also focus on what we've done wrong. Is there a commonality there, for instance?

Sure. This is the hard conversation that needs to be had. I actually think it's a misstep to argue about the framing of whether we did or didn't fail. Right? Your analogy to marriage counseling is, like, so apt.

Right? Because it's, like, we can spend all our time in a counseling session arguing about the exact nature of the wrongdoing. Did you lie or did you not? Was it just a misrepresentation of the truth or was it a lie? You know, all this stuff.

Right. And to a certain extent, you have to go through that in order to clean out the wound and heal. And it may just be that America is in that phase of cleaning out the wound, of just letting the emotions be aired for hundreds of years of trauma that have been inflicted on certain parts of this nation. I hope that we don't stay there forever, because if we do, we'll eat ourselves alive. We will undo the very foundations of the idea of this nation.

So that does worry me. To me, it's a matter of how long we stay there versus how quickly we can rediscover a shared vision of what we're building toward. But I don't think it's like, okay. Well, yeah. But let's not talk about that quite so much.

Like, we have to actually let the trauma breathe, but we can't stay there forever. And I'm really looking for the leaders who are going to lead us in the national healing that needs to happen, not just the national reckoning. We move past the step of reckoning, you gotta get into a space of healing. How are we gonna do that? And that's where we need our best cultural and spiritual innovators to give us a path forward.

One of the advantages of, as you said, going and talking to your neighbor is understanding, like, there are people that are afraid of COVID, and there are people afraid of vaccines. And instead of demonizing people, understand what their real fears and hopes are, and we realize that we're not as different as we think we are. And you say that the leaders are trying to bring people together, but I think we have to create safe spaces like we're trying to do today where we can have these dialogues where we're not triggering each other, where we're not calling each other names. And I think the more we create those safe spaces for people and we learn to have these dialogues and that's what my hope is, is that if we can encourage people to take that baby step of talking to the other, even if it's just for five minutes, that something wonderful can come out of that. Yeah.

And remembering that we wanna talk to them not about our points of disagreement. Right? Like, there's a certain skill or piece of this that we're missing where we always think, okay. Well, if I see someone signaling a political position that I disagree with, what I really need is to go in there and talk to them about that political disagreement. And it's like, woah.

Woah. Woah. Like, we've done none of the trust building, none of the baseline relationship building. We don't even feel like neighbors. Do we even know each other's name?

Do we know each other's kids' names? Have we ever talked about anything? What makes you think that you're gonna be able to go in there and have a constructive conversation about a really touchy and difficult subject? And so I think part of what's happening with this hyper individualism and this cultural and social isolation is unfortunately, that we've kind of lost the skill of basic neighborliness, if that makes sense. And I think that we have to start there.

And once we have a baseline level of trust, then maybe opening up to have some of these harder conversations. It's really hard to have conversations about deep disagreements in the complete absence of trust. So there needs to be some trust rebuilding, building relationship around our shared humanity. And I also think that we just need to get out of the habit of believing the signaling. Social media, one of the phenomena in our culture that I think it's created is that it's become such a shorthand version of communication that everything is about signaling.

And so what I mean by that is I have a neighbor across the street from a house where I used to live who in response to the Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 placed a huge, like, a massive, like, back to blue flag in his front yard. I would have to look out my window over my laptop looking at my window every single day at this massive back to blue flag. I made it a point to really get to know this person who does not share my politics, and I don't really think that that was an appropriate response to that movement personally. But he's not a racist, and that is what I learned over time as I got to know him better, that there were other reasons and other concerns that caused him to create that signal. But if I would have looked at that signal and got, oh, racist, like, I don't wanna have anything to do with him, not touching that guy with a 10 foot pole.

Like, we never would have been able to get into a more nuanced conversation. And so I really think it's important for people to check their belief in the signaling. Let's look past that and realize that everyone's a human being and there's a lot more nuance underneath that flag or that sign or that thing that we've put up on our social media account to signal this is the team that I'm on. We've gotta be able to move past that. How much do you think it does relate to, as you talked about, the nationalization of politics and news and also social media in the following scenario?

I remember studying advertising and the notion that advertising is designed to create dissatisfaction. I'm wondering in the same way that social media is saying in order to get people to view this and go from a 100 users to 3,000,000,000 users, we've realized that when we get people angry, they spend more time and they share those tweets more. Part of this notion of, as you said, focusing on shared values instead of what divides us. But at the same time that that's going on, social media is purposely trying to divide us. We've gotta take control of this and realize we're being triggered.

We've gotta slow this down to rebuild that trust. Yeah. I mean, for sure. In the wake of the Facebook whistleblower's testimony of a couple of weeks ago, it's no mystery at all that this is exactly how it works, that they know it. They've been exploiting it.

But there are a couple different ways to respond to that. One is to say, oh, my gosh. Facebook is evil. Let's destroy Facebook, or let's put all the blame on them. Right?

Which granted, there's plenty of blame that they need to take on, and there needs to be some internal regulation of Facebook as well as federal regulation, I believe, of the social media giants. But I also think there's no debate now. We know what's going on. And so as users of these platforms, we do have choices. Right?

Are we gonna take the clickbait, or are we gonna go, This is one of those scenarios in which they really want me to click on this inflammatory news and share it before I read it. Am I gonna do that or am I not? And am I gonna curate my own feed in such a way that I'm being exposed to darkness and fighting all the time, or am I going to work with that algorithm in such a way that I can harness this as a force for good? I mean, I think that it can cut both ways. I absolutely believe in the power of the individual to have some control over the influence of this thing that feels like you couldn't control it.

But I really believe that on some level, you can. That doesn't mean that we should not advocate for federal regulation. I absolutely think that we should and that these should be complimentary for sure. You're going back to that notion of not having the pendulum go too far. It's the middle way.

Some regulation is good, but we also have to be adults and take control back of our lives. I wanna also touch on something, which is my mother was into a English psychiatrist by the name of John Bowlby who coined a bunch of stuff related to attachment therapy and separation anxiety, and so she named her dog after him. I noticed that you have a dog named Dewey, and I'm wondering if that in any way relates to John Dewey. Yeah. He's named after John Dewey, which was one of the most influential American philosophers during the progressive era who had a lot to do with reforming the way that we do education in America.

And I think John Dewey is a really interesting example of another phenomenon of this progressive era that we haven't touched on as much, which is another progressive named Louis Brandeis talked about something called the laboratories of democracy, that what we needed is more innovators in the laboratories of democracy. And I really view John Dewey as one of these people. His question was how do we educate better for democratic citizenship? And he just experimented. He started all these interesting kindergartens in Chicago, and he was a big participant in the settlement house movement.

I just think he was such a good example of having a vision, which is young people equipped for democratic citizenship and knowing that the education system that we had wasn't quite getting us there and then tinkering with what he had to work with until he could figure out new ways of getting us there. And so I love John Dewey for that reason. And yes, our little dog, our little Shih Tzu, is named for one of my favorite progressives, John Dewey. And in our remaining time, I mean, I know that you, in the upswing, credit a lot of the change to universal high school education. And it was a movement that started a lot in the small towns.

If you look at what's going on right now with critical race theory, and I'm not an expert on it, but it's creating a lot of divisiveness. I wonder, in terms of preparing the young people of today for these complex issues we're dealing with, are there less polarizing things we can teach in our schools? Like, for instance, learning to talk to the other. You're probably more up on this than I am. Is there a movement to helping people work on going from I to we?

Yeah. I mean, there's not like a coordinated I to we movement, but there are lots of threads of that. I mean, one of which is empathy education. I think it's one of the most inspiring things. And I'm not gonna remember the woman's name who is really the sort of spearhead of this.

I apologize for that. But I think that there's a lot of really interesting education programs right now experimenting with how best to teach children empathy. We don't just need to listen. We need to be able to take on what others are experiencing in a real way. That's what empathy is.

Right? So there's a lot of good experimentation at that. There's also something interesting called action civics, which I really like. All of the things that I think that are happening in education that are very exciting are experiential learning. Again, going back to John Dewey, my hero, he's all about experiential learning, right?

That we don't just need to teach kids concepts. We need to teach kids by giving them opportunities to do. As much as it's important to look at history with a critical lens and to rethink maybe some of the accepted narratives that maybe aren't so true as we thought they were, it's also important again to have the experience of building together. We can look at the past and I think what critical race theory, I think it's been widely misunderstood, and the polarization largely comes from a basic misunderstanding of what it is. First of all, I'll say that.

But I think that what it's asking us to do is actually just to look at the past and say, let's be honest about what really happened. And that's actually step one in problem solving. Right? But then what happens if we don't have steps two, three, and four, which is okay? We know what went wrong.

Do we know what we're building toward? We know where we fell short now. But do we know what that vision is? What that shared vision is? Those shared values?

Do we know what we're building toward? And then are we giving kids the opportunities to work together toward that shared future? It's not necessarily the critical race theory that's the problem. It's that if we stop there, then, yes, we give young people the impression that America is just fundamentally broken. End of story.

But what if we say this is the first step in a process of saying, this is what didn't go right. This is where we're headed. This is what our vision is. And now let's all work together to get there. I love that.

A lot of times people feel frustrated and they feel helpless, and they want their leaders to fix things, and we're all waiting for that person to ride in on a white horse, so to speak, and fix things. I'm wondering as a concluding thought, is there any one thing that you might recommend to our listeners that they could do? Just one thing that would be simple to do that would allow them to participate in helping us move from I to we. Yeah. So speaking of movements that are trying to do this, there's been a real movement over the last five years called the dialogue movement.

And it's been this really grassroots thing where it's like people all over America have suddenly had this realization that people don't talk to each other across lines of difference. And so there's been all these different innovative ways of making that happen. There's living room conversations and there's supper clubs, and there's all sorts of different little experiments that people have done all over America. And recently, those have been united under an umbrella called the Listen First project. They have a website where you can go and you can identify these types of experiments or opportunities or activities that are happening in your community to begin to engage in conversation across difference.

That idea of getting into the same room as your neighbor, getting in the same room as someone who's different from you, and having some kind of facilitated conversation in which trust is rebuilt is absolutely the fundamental starting point of moving back toward we. We can't be a we if we don't even see or choose to engage with someone other than ourselves. Right? And so I think that that listen first project, I would highly recommend checking that out and finding one way in which you can participate in something that puts you into a meaningful conversation with someone who is different than yourself. That is a wonderful suggestion, and I will be the first person to check out the Listen First project because it sounds like a wonderful idea.

So, Shaylyn, thank you so so much for joining us today. This has been very inspiring. I urge everyone to read The Upswing. It is just a fabulous book. It's amazing to me how balanced it is.

And, Shailene, I love the way you presented your optimism for the future. So, again, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. It's been a fun conversation, and I hope that, we've inspired one or two people to have a little more hope about the future of our country. Well, you've inspired me, Shaylyn.

Thanks so much. It's been great to be here.