339 - Enlightened Disagreement

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0:58Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 339. I'm David McCraney.

1:35This is the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. And I just got back from one of the most rewarding and challenging and fascinating experiences I've had as a science journalist who is deeply invested in a better understanding of disagreement, arguing, deliberation, how that happens in the brain, between brains, in cultures. If you've listened to this show for a while, you know there are a lot of people who study that sort of thing scientifically. We've had them on the show, we've talked to them, and there are organizations out there devoted to improving discourse in the modern era.

2:14There are organizations out there devoted to funding and coordinating research in this domain. And there are organizations that are devoted to creating a system of lessons and programs and even games that hopefully could enter K-12 education, college education, to do all of the above. I just spent a few weeks working with an organization doing all of that.

2:44One with a pretty fantastic title also. That title? The Lidowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement. And what do they do at this center? What is its mission? Saving disagreement from polarization. Saving disagreement from polarization. That is what they are really, truly working on. And the person who just shared that is Brad Zachran.

3:17I'm Brad Zachran. I am the curriculum director at the Lidowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University. I met Brad while I was serving as a writer in residence at Northwestern, where I helped kick off the pilot program at the Lidowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement. And yes, they are aware that that name is amazing and high-minded and harkens back to old academia, its own purpose. I was there to help them launch a residential certification curriculum, a series of classes that they did there, exercises that students who signed up to be part of this pilot program took part in.

3:57In those classes, the students learned advanced dialogue skills, listening skills, disagreement skills across six modules. For example, the first module involved learning high-impact active listening, the kind you would need to perform improv on stage in front of a big audience. And they learned that via an improvisation exercise taught by Heather Barnes, a communications professor at Northwestern and a former faculty member at the Second City Training Center in Chicago.

4:33Second City is a legendary comedy institution with alumni like Tina Fey, Amy Poehler, Chris Farley, Bill Murray. The students, they gathered up and they learned, they practiced in person during the classes, how to do this improvisation exercise. And then they'd go out and practice outside of class and then return for debriefings and more modules. Allow me to introduce Dr. Eli Finkel, a psychologist who is also one of two faculty directors at the Center for Enlightened Disagreement.

5:07And here he is explaining how all of this came together, how it was laid out over time. First quarter was basic skills. There were several of us who had some concern about throwing, for example, first quarter freshmen, some of the people are first-year students, in at the deep end with really contentious issues. And so the first quarter was basic skills. So our friend Heather Barnes came in and did some demonstrations of key techniques from Second City, astoundingly effective at teaching people how to listen, not just for what people are saying, but for what's underneath what people are saying.

5:38And then we brought in Martin Carcasson, who I think also is a friend of the podcast here. Yes, Dr. Martin Carcasson, who is the director of the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State. He appeared on episode 331 of this podcast, where he discussed the wicked problems that often emerge during debate. That's what they call them, wicked problems. And they emerge during disagreement and deliberation. And he and his team at Colorado State are developing ways to facilitate that kind of deliberation, especially in local government, to, as they put it, quote,

6:14spark processes that are particularly designed to avoid triggering the worst in human nature and tap into the best. And he asked people to think seriously about values, nine different values, all of which are good. Those values are community, freedom, individual responsibility, diversity, tradition, progress, equality, justice, and security. Everybody values all nine of these things.

6:44How would you rank them? Oh, that's interesting. Now that you've ranked them, how did the person next to you rank them? Why did you rate security as number one and I rated it as number seven? And that was incredibly stimulating. In the winter quarter, that's where we did start tossing them in toward the deeper end. We used Steve Frankenery's game, a game called Point Taken, to allow them the opportunity to engage in a discussion of a politically contentious issue. Yes, Dr. Steve Frankenery. He's a cognitive scientist who has done incredible work at his visual laboratory at Northwestern.

7:19He appeared on episode 329, and on that episode, he shared a project that came out of his work studying data visualization. He and his team, they found astonishingly effective ways to visualize arguments, the kind of arguments that tend to grow toxic and turn into fights. Using all that research, they created a game called, as Eli just mentioned, Point Taken. This game involves picking a topic, writing reasons on octagonal pieces of paper for being for or against this topic or something related to it or something within it,

7:57and placing those tiles around a big octagon in the middle of the table or wherever you're playing this. And inside that big octagon is the original question or the topic that's being discussed or argued. And as you keep playing, each side writes rebuttals to the reasons already on the game board. And these rebuttal tiles go down next to the reasons tiles, and on it goes, both sides working to quote-unquote win the game. And the way you win the game is by closing a thread.

8:29And the way you close a thread is by placing a thumbs-up emoji token on tiles you agree are good rebuttals. Or you place scale emojis on rebuttals that indicate different priorities. Or you place an emoji for, we should fact-check this. Or you place one for, this is a difference of personal taste. And once all the threads on the board are closed, your team wins. And what's so cool about the way that we were able to do it with the Point Taken game is the game is structured to maximize argument mapping.

9:06There has to be a formal structure to the case that people are making. It's embedded in the game. And also communication skills. You can think of it as like couples therapy plus logical thinking is the game. And that got tense sometimes, but they just plowed through. They plowed through it when it got tense. And then the last session in the middle part was deliberative polling. So some people out there might have heard of the idea of America in one room. But the idea is if you were to design a democracy where people actually think critically about the issues and are equipped with the most relevant arguments and the best information,

9:38what would it look like if they got 10 people around a table to debate the issues? And so we did various aspects of free speech, campus free speech, and to what degree should social media companies be responsible for things posted on their platforms? Really in the weeds and excellent. And then I'm delighted to say that we brought you, David McGraney, in for the spring quarter. So the fifth of the sixth modules was a keynote address. We gave all of the students in the program a copy of your book, How Minds Change. People out there, if you have not yet memorized it, I urge you to buy and read or listen to it as soon as you can.

10:14And then we had you in residency here long enough that we were able to do the sixth and final module with you happening now. And what we did there is you had trained people up on how to do telescoping, a form of communicating about politically contentious or morally complicated issues, a basic version of how one might want to do that. And so you helped debrief that technique that you exposed them to. And then we then closed down the overall experience. And the debriefings at the end were, it was just a pleasure how actively engaged the students were

10:44and how insightful they were about what they'd learned throughout the course of the year. This experience was really interesting for me because a lot of these concepts, like I've been researching or like I think about very actively because, again, like this is the field that I want to pursue. That's Tyshia Woods, a student at Northwestern who went through all of this. She's a senior studying psychology and international studies. But my long-term aspirations are to just work in peace. So I'm really interested in peace and conflict resolution,

11:16which was kind of why I was interested in joining the center. As you can hear, the students were so highly engaged. They took these modules very seriously. They had so many questions, so many insights. So I think it was very interesting from the standpoint of seeing what it means and what it looks like for students to engage in this space a bit more organically, like not in a class discussion, but also maybe not at the macro level of like people who do conflict resolution and all this stuff at a high scale.

11:47So I think for me, the modules were a very interesting exercise of like understanding how do these skills, like what does it look like in practice basically? In my modules, a lot of the students told me they had some experience with debate back in high school. They'd been on debate teams and such, and they were really into that sort of thing. So they were surprised at how debate was either de-emphasized or completely reframed across

12:18all of the modules. The dynamic of this whole structure, I think it's very, very well organized, and it makes a really comfortable environment for students to get involved in it. And even though disagreement is in the name of the program, I think it never felt really like that. It felt more just curiosity and conversations and active listening and fun. That was Yihuan Zhou, a student at Northwestern who went through the modules, and she is studying

12:49mechanical engineering. I'm really interested in healthcare robotics and the whole side of bioengineering as well. Yihuan shared that for her, the best part of the program was how all of this set her up to have a different kind of conversation during the two student coffee chats that the center held with the administration. In those chats, the students could ask any questions they wished, but with their new active

13:20listening skills, the ones that had been enhanced by the modules and their conversational skills that had been leveled up, Yihuan found herself perspective-taking and in a whole new way. These two coffee chats were one with President Michael Schill and another with President Henry Beenan. Back in high school, Yihuan had been president of the student council, and she said it involved a lot of conflict, a lot of disagreement, a lot of value clashing.

13:52But using what she had learned in the program, in the modules, well, this conversation was illuminating. I had asked them, having such a hard job, like you basically have the impossible task of making everyone happy and managing such a big school where you have to communicate and work directly with the government and also with a board of trustees, with students, parents, faculty.

14:23So much happening. So many different values are being in conflict. What do you make of that and what is your approach? After hearing the responses, my own mind was actually completely changed on how I viewed the way my high school principals approached leadership and administrating. I think it combines a lot of things. First of all, I'm getting to hear so many perspectives from President Schill, President Beenan, but

14:54then also I am thinking really critically. I'm trying to put myself in their shoes, asking them questions. I get to compare and evaluate the responses and experiences and then applying that to my own life, my own experience and tension with administration in high school. And then all throughout high school, I had a lot of tension. But now looking back, I'm like, wow, I really respect my high school principal. What I really appreciated about this was the modules took things that are components of

15:28other interactions and foregrounded them to be the main objective of what people were trying to do. That's another Northwestern student, Adrian Wu. I'm double majoring in economics and learning and organizational change with an AI minor. I like people. I'm interested in people. I like teams. And that's what attributed this program. Adrian said that for him, the modules showed that in any conversation that involves disagreement, there will be things motivating each party that maybe neither party is aware of or neither

16:02party is willing to admit outright if they don't feel safe to do so. So, for example, if you are having a conversation with your parents, the objective is probably not to destroy anything in your life, but also probably it's like to get whatever you want out of the conversation. But that first thing is a little bit background in our brains, I think sometimes, because we just sort of think about how can we win in this conversation. And then that ends up being the point where you feel very vulnerable because if I let up,

16:35then I'll be showing weakness. But I think what the modules did really well is that they set up a really supportive and safe environment for that aspect of learning how to be more intentional with conversations as the main priority instead of winning at something else through conversation. So it was simply an act of how can we interact with another human being a little bit more intentionally, regardless of what context it is in. For my part of all of this, as Eli Finkel just shared a moment ago, I gave a keynote lecture

17:19on how minds change my book. I took parts of that book and demonstrated how they related to the program. And then we moved into a more workshop-like setting where I introduced the students to something I like to call telescoping, which is my combination of motivational interviewing techniques from psychology and therapeutic practices, therapy, combined with something they teach you in journalism school, which is the art of asking follow-up questions. It's something that journalist Monica Guzman and I touched on briefly in episode 306, discussing

17:55her book, I Never Thought of It That Way. Guzman learned her version of follow-up question asking from a workshop led by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jackie Bonazynski. In my version of this exercise, you ask a question that activates a person's introspection, and then you follow that question with another question that activates that person's reasoning. It evokes their reasoning, their justifications and rationalizations and explanations for why

18:26they answered the way they did in the first question. For training purposes, you start with something innocuous, like, do you enjoy it when people sing happy birthday at a birthday party? And then you follow that question with another question that boils down to asking the person why or why not. Once you've asked for the other person's reasoning, you then must focus on each answer as they come to you and ask follow-up questions that only address their most recent answer.

19:00And you keep doing that, each follow-up question referring to the most recent answer for as long as possible. After a set amount of time, you switch roles with your partner, and they ask you a different question, but with the same rules. And once you get the gist of this, and you've practiced a little bit, you can open with a question about a person's opinion on a polarized topic, a political issue, a moral issue, or something that is personal. It's affecting you and the other person, affecting your family, affecting your relationship.

19:30After demonstrating all this, showing all this, doing the exercises, we sent the students out into the world to do this on their own. And then they came back the next week to learn more. When they came back, I talked about confabulation, which is when portions of the brain that speak for you, they're somehow isolated from particular stimuli. And those portions will then outright lie about why you are responding in a certain way to those stimuli, that create narratives that are believable, plausible, defensible.

20:04But what makes them confabulation is that, well, they're just not true. And you, the person who is saying all this, believe these statements are true. So it's lying, but your conscious self is not aware that it's lying. And I talked about all this to help frame how motivated reasoning works in general and what can happen when two people discuss an issue in such a way that it can become a surprising revelation to the person on the other side, that that is underpinning a lot of their

20:34argumentation. The students shared in the debriefings, it often only took three or four questions before the other person found themselves articulating things they may have never considered before. And in so doing, they often felt some dissonance between their initial knee-jerk responses, their assumed motivations, their assumed explanations, and the deeper underlying values that became more and more clear over the course of the conversations.

21:05They also shared that they found that both sides felt okay to be vulnerably and transparently interviewed in this way. And through that communication, they were able to produce less confabulatory justifications and explanations, things that emerge in this kind of interaction. And on the question asker side, each time you do this, you become a better non-judgmental active listener, a crucial skill set for the sort of things the Lidowitz Center for Enlightened

21:36Disagreement aims to teach. It was really such an amazing organic experience of having everybody come in to this room and then all authentically be vulnerable and really try to improve at these things because these are difficult topics and they make people uncomfortable, like challenging themselves in these ways. And it could have easily just turned into a thing where you show up and you just kind of like eat food and you talk about some stuff and you listen to somebody have a slideshow

22:07and then you leave. But instead it turned into this, I think, really intentional, shared by many, many students sort of community of people who are all trying to gain something unique for themselves out of it. You don't get experiences like these a lot where there's no phones, no laptops in sight. Everybody is just talking to one another for an hour and a half straight. Like it's just person to person interaction. The most electronics is like a slideshow. That's kind of it. So I just think stuff like that is hard to find nowadays. And to have something like this, especially in the pilot year, is something really, really

22:39magical. By the way, Monica Guzman, who I mentioned a moment ago, is a senior fellow at Braver Angels, a bridging organization who sent a representative to help develop these training programs, these modules. That all happened at a meeting a couple of months ago. That's where I first met all these incredible people that Northwestern gathered to help create

23:14the center and this pilot program. They held a conference of experts and enthusiasts and nerds on these topics, all devoted to coming up with better ways to teach people how to have better disagreements. And at that conference, we all gathered to compare notes and trade ideas. And Braver Angels sent Jesse Manisto, their director of debates, who created a formal argumentation framework, which uses a moderator and a set of rules that combined truly works wonders.

23:45And I'll have links to all of that, all the things mentioned so far in the show notes. But as you can see, there are a lot of connections here with You Are Not So Smart and my book, How Minds Change. For instance, I should mention Eli, Eli Finkel, has been a guest on this show back on episode 319, where he talked about what movies often get wrong about romantic love, relationships and human intimacy in general. He has his own podcast about that sort of thing called Love Factually and a book about that called The All or Nothing Marriage.

24:17I am Eli Finkel, a professor at Northwestern. I study intimate relationships and political partisanship. And as I mentioned earlier, Eli is one of the two faculty directors and a co-founder of the Center for Enlightened Disagreement. The other being chair of the center, Dr. Noor Kattali. Hi, I'm Noor Kattali, and I'm a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School of Management here at Northwestern University. And I study intergroup conflict and intergroup relationships. Okay, so you've met a few of the principal players at the Lidowitz Center for Enlightened

24:52Disagreement at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Eli Finkel, Noor Kattali, and Brad Zachron. And you've heard from some of the students who went through the pilot program there, which brings us to something I want to talk about after the break, which is something new that they're working on in partnership with the Medill School of Journalism, something that is very in line with what we often talk about here on the You Are Not So Smart podcast, intellectual

25:26humility, skepticism, science, literacy, media literacy, all of that combined together with the resources of the center and its power to educate and illuminate people in service of its mission, which, as Brad Zachron puts it, is saving disagreement from polarization. After this break, you will hear all about this new initiative, this gamification of science literacy through the center. And then we will return to Eli Finkel and Noor Kattali, who will tell us all about what

25:59this pilot program was like for them and what they have in store next for the center for enlightened disagreement. All that after this break.

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30:27I'm David McCraney. This is the You Are Not So Smart podcast. And the person who you are about to hear is journalist and journalism professor Patty Wolter. Hi, I'm Patty Wolter. I am the Helen Gurley Brown Magazine professor at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University. As a journalism professor at one of the most respected journalism schools in the world, Patty Wolter teaches her students about a lot of fascinating topics. Fact-checking, science writing, narrative structure, feature writing, magazine writing,

31:00storytelling in general, and much more. Journalism is alive and well. And there are many, many students learning the trade right now who are about to enter the world and tell us about that world. And as digital natives, they will take some of the old and some of the new and put that together and carry journalism forward for another generation. That's what Patty Wolter does.

31:30Prepare students of journalism for a world that desperately needs them to be great at their jobs. And right now, Patty Wolter is working on a new related project. And I think it's easier to introduce it to you with a question. Here is Patty Wolter asking that question. True or false. Most American women do not eat an adequate amount of protein daily, especially for weight loss and strength training. True or false. Most American women do not eat an adequate amount of daily protein,

32:05especially for weight loss and strength training. What is your gut reaction to this question? Does it feel right to say this is true or does it feel right to say this is false? Well, the answer is, according to a lot of science devoted to this topic, in the United States right now, everyone is getting plenty of protein. Most adults, most men and women meet or exceed their daily recommended amount of protein daily.

32:39And you don't need meat or eggs or protein powders or protein bars or taco flavored protein chips to get that daily recommended amount of daily protein. Oatmeal, yogurt, bananas, all sources of protein. If you add some cheese or any meat of any kind, you will likely exceed your daily requirements, even if you're strength training. Despite this, in a recent survey of U.S. adults, 71% said they were worried they were not getting enough protein.

33:15And my sources for all of that, if you are like a little skeptical, which I hope you are and hope you always will be, that's research by Dr. Joshua L. Hudson and his team. He's a gastroenterologist and research scientist at UNC Chapel Hill. In addition, I checked the Department of Agriculture's Food Data Central Database, along with reporting on the topic by journalist Alice Callahan, who covers nutrition and health for The New York Times. I'll put links to all of that in the show notes for this episode. The point here with this question and all these sources is this is what Patty Walter is working on right now.

33:55The science reporting of it, the back and forth conversation we're having with science reporting or the lack thereof. Despite all of this being readily available and common knowledge among scientists who study nutrition and diet and how bodies do what bodies do, most of the United States is currently wrong about this particular topic, protein. Not just factually incorrect, but worried about it and worried about it because they are confidently wrong when it comes to opinions and attitudes based on some factually incorrect beliefs.

34:36And they don't know that they don't know that they are incorrect. In fact, they believe they're very much correct about the lack of protein in their diets. So much so they might argue about this online, in their homes, with their families, and so on. This is why Patty Walter is currently working on a new project focused on basic science literacy and basic science communication on the part of journalists.

35:06How to get better at explaining how we know what we know, and by we, I mean experts, scientists, people who know things, and how to better convey all that sort of thing to your audience. For me, the idea here seems a lot like reigniting the flame of science communicators like Carl Sagan, who focused on the method of thinking like a scientist as much as the science itself. And all of this is for students, both in high school and college.

35:39The focus, to reiterate, is a foundational understanding about how science does science, how it knows what it knows, hypothesizes what it hypothesizes, and all for the sake of becoming a better consumer of science news, and a better skeptic of science-y sounding nonsense, and a better communicator of all of the above. So, this project, it's in the prototype beta testing stage, and Patty is working on that project, that beta version of this whole idea,

36:11with Brad Zachron, who introduced himself earlier, but here he is introducing himself a second time. I'm Brad Zachron. I am the curriculum director at the Lidowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University. And this partnership is possible, because the center isn't just producing a series of modules. It's also doing research and developing programs, games, and lesson plans for K-12 education and beyond. The idea being, with the resources at their disposal, with the expertise at their disposal at a university like this,

36:46with a center like this, they could produce things that would go into the mainstream. They already have a game, like Point Taken, and another game they consulted on and were introduced to by Joshua Green, who was on an episode of this podcast talking about this, called Tango. You can check that out at letstango.org. You can listen to Joshua Green talk about this on episode 327. It's a game that helps people overcome disagreement. It helps people become more intellectually humble.

37:17It's really cool. And Joshua Green was at that original conference of people who wanted to help the center get started and design the pilot program. So gamification was a big part of that original meeting. So they're imagining this science literacy idea as a game, something that could go mainstream, something that might end up on an app on your phone or part of a magazine or national newspaper. However, this game, this potential game, is something that Brad Zacharin and Patty Walter together co-imagined

37:53after they met at an institution at Northwestern called The Garage, which is an entity that helps students learn about entrepreneurialism. The Garage held a problem summit where they invited faculty to present problems in the world that students could possibly work on to possibly help solve through a new business or product or an invention. And at that summit, Brad Zacharin introduced the center and all of its intricacies, along with one of its games, Point Taken.

38:25Patty Walter gave a talk about science literacy and the lack thereof in the currently chaotic media creation and media consumption ecosystem. And in that talk, she asked the following questions of the audience. Last year, there was a comet, the third interstellar interloper. This suggests possible signs of alien life. True or false, last year, we saw a comet come pretty close to Earth, the third interstellar interloper in a relatively brief window of time.

38:56Does this suggest possible signs of alien life? Next question. 2024, the last complete record was the hottest year in record, as well as the highest CO2 levels in the atmosphere. True or false. And here's another. The CDC FDA created the VAERS database in 1990 and has a three-decade record of adverse vaccine reactions. True or false. Here's another one. True or false. Caffeine is linked to shorter lifespans. And one more. There is a possible link between autism and Tylenol consumption during pregnancy.

39:27True or false. Patty Walter asked all of these questions, including the earlier one about protein consumption, of the students who attended the Problem Summit at Northwestern. I did a mix of things that had been in the news that were heavy hitters in the world of misinformation and also not. And the only one the students got right was the false statement of there's a possible link between autism and Tylenol consumption during pregnancy. To be clear, the current consensus is there is no causal connection.

39:59As recently as March of 2026, a meta-study, a study of studies, 43 studies, found across all that research, there was no evidence that acetaminophen use during pregnancy increased the risk of autism. That was the only one they correctly answered false. Which you might think would cause Patty Walter to feel some optimism. But her concern is right or wrong. How are you vetting your opinions on scientific, fact-based issues like these?

40:34And then I said, how do you know that? And you probably even saw the audience better than I did, but one of the guys raised his hands and he was sort of motioned, he's like, because we're here. And I said, well, who's looked at the studies? Who read the articles that explained why they did studies as siblings and why that, you know? And nobody had. Nobody could answer how they knew that they knew this. Yes. It was their environment and their political leanings and their university setting that in this case sort of probably is right

41:08and that there are degrees of separation from the kinds of researchers that do this and can explain to them why it's that there is not a link between autism and Tylenol consumption during pregnancy. So they're not wrong there, but the fact that they couldn't even answer that, and I think going back to the protein one, it is not hard to look up information from legitimate medical sites that explain that most people get way more protein than they need, right? And yet we're not questioning why we even need to question that in some cases,

41:43let alone what your sources are or what sources would be good sources. And again, how do you know you know that? So after this event, after presenting her problem and seeing the audience's reaction, seeing their answers, and then watching Brad Zakarin's presentation about gamifying argumentation, she couldn't shake the idea that maybe there was a connection here. Maybe there was a possibility here, a potential. By the time I went to the parking lot, I was emailing the guy who organized it. By the way, this was a Saturday, and I was not entirely thrilled about coming back to campus.

42:18I'm like, hey, that was really, really fun. And I think that the students, if they were really listening to what we all said, should take Brad's game and solution and apply that to my problem with science literacy. By Sunday night, I had an email from Brad saying that he had said the exact same thing to Mike, but Brad took it a step further and had already designed a game that could lend itself to both understanding disagreement and increasing science literacy. I was so intrigued by what she was talking about and felt so much resonance with her problem

42:51and the problem that I was about to pitch. I was able to get through my time in pretty good order. And like Patty said, by the time the session was over, we had already asked Mike about combining forces. And I was so inspired. I started working on a game that night. And Patty and I are eager to develop this and have already had some conversations about different directions it could go in and how to refine it. There's a lot in the realm of enlightened disagreement about topics involving scientific literacy

43:22because some of the most heated debates in public right now are around things like vaccines and some things that we would commonly take as accepted in the realm of science. And the way she put together her presentation with the quiz made me think about certain other initiatives out there. I know you've had Josh Green from Harvard on your podcast talking about his game Tango and the way you can play these online games and test yourself, collaborate with somebody,

43:52and then check in on how well do I really know something. And so what Patty brought to the table struck me as something that was relevant to the larger world of enlightened disagreement work but also very applicable to my focus of that day, which is developing games for the K-12 world because there's a lot that's happening in basic science education in the K-12 world where you would hope students are coming to understand the basics of the scientific method and that the point of the scientific method isn't to prove a thing.

44:26It's to find out more, enhance a theory, make us more confident, more sure that we know something until somebody tells us otherwise. And so it struck me as I'm about to give this pitch to a bunch of really curious and creative Northwestern students and what Patty just served up on a silver platter is the potential theme or basis of a game. And it was so compelling that, like she said earlier, I went off that night

45:00and started putting together the shell of a game. So what is this game that you're both interested in? What is this next step that we're thinking about? So the idea is to set up what will likely be an online game where people can put their scientific literacy to the test. And we would invite players to come in and let us know what they think their level of scientific literacy is. And then they can answer a number of questions.

45:31Some of them would be along the lines of the examples that Patty gave from her presentation at the garage. And if they answer a question and it's wrong, we would have the game present them with the correct information. And we could ask them, would they like to know what the basis of the correct answer is? And then they could be opting into getting a little bit more information. And there could be links embedded in that.

46:03They would then have the option to click on those links. And so along the way, as they're demonstrating their scientific literacy or lack thereof, they would be generating data for us about how one's self-assessment is correlated with their knowledge, is correlated with their curiosity to learn more about something that maybe they don't know as well as they thought they knew. So if they got something right, what did they base the answer on?

46:36Is it common knowledge? Is it part of a belief system, you know, religion, faith perhaps? Is it from a source? Like did they read a story recently? Did they learn it in school? And try to get them to think, I answered true or false very quickly, but why did I answer quickly and why did I answer that way? And so throughout the game, what should happen, whether it is ultimately a one-player or a two-player game,

47:07is people are going to get to the end and have a chance to reassess their scientific literacy. And we hope that they'll walk away with a little bit more intellectual humility. One of the things that would be interesting about a two-player version is there could be some degrees of collaboration like Tango offers. And there would also be an opportunity to see what your partner got wrong and then at the end of the game be able to answer some questions

47:41where you're projecting what you think the profile of your partner is, their age, their education level, their political leanings. And so you get some exciting gameplay, but you also generate some interesting data that can inform refinements of the game and help us think more subtly about topics like scientific literacy, like intellectual humility, and correlations between mindsets and skill sets, like am I going to bother to click through to actually learn more when I get something wrong?

48:15I also really liked a whole section of the draft that Brad created is about what is an authoritative source and a credible source and not what I think is an authoritative or credible source, but what the user, the person playing the game, thinks is a credible or an authoritative source. In my perfect world, and we haven't gotten this far yet, there might be some way to ultimately, I guess this is the teacher in me talking, bring it around to what is a way that explains why one source might be credible to a scientific community or, you know, again, I always want to be careful with what my view of a credible science source is

48:57and why versus people who believe something that maybe doesn't feel is credible, but where can there ultimately in the answers and the training lend to teaching? And that may be once we gather a whole lot of data that we then go back and think about refining. I have an amazing PhD student that I'm working with in the science communication certificate, but who's in cognitive science and looking at something called refutation text. And how do you order information to honor somebody's belief, whether it's true or false, and then frame the information that comes after it such that it actually has the power to change their minds?

49:37And this, and you know this way better than I do, you've written about people's tendency to hear facts and get more entrenched in the thing they already believed. But there is some psychology around where you can order information and bring people to the point of having a better assessment tool and maybe changing their minds. And I would love the game to both help us assess and understand science literacy, but get to a point where we're giving people the kind of information that, and I think this is what I was learning even with reading your book, is you empower people to have the knowledge so that they feel in control of changing their own minds.

50:13And that, to me, would be the ultimate goal of science literacy. But the game, of course, starts with this, how do you know what you know, and how do you believe what you know, and at least starting this point of questioning and conveniently also allowing us to study it. There's sort of a dice roll of nature and nurture thing. There's a distribution of being comfortable. Journalists, scientists, people, and academics really like not knowing stuff. Being introduced to a great pocket of ignorance I wasn't aware of before is exciting because I can walk into that ignorant space. And it seems to me that there's a way that this game that you're describing can introduce that being a positive thing.

50:49I'm interested in the game that you're imagining here. One thing that I'm sensitive to is, like, how do we avoid in the game, like, ha-ha, you believe that, like making them feel silly and stupid and just avoiding a shame state. A lot of that does get into the details of not only the content that we're bringing in, but also the responsiveness of the game. A lot of standardized testing for folks in the K-12 world today. It's all done online, and the better you're doing, the harder the questions will get.

51:24So I think we can modulate how the game advances so that somebody who's struggling may not continue to get harder and harder questions. They might get more questions that are designated as being at a certain level to increase the likelihood of them getting some wins in there. And that's why Patty and I need to get through the rest of this academic year and spend some more time together and, being completely honest, spend more time with people who have greater expertise, whether it's faculty and graduate students in fields like psychology

52:00or some of the undergraduates and graduate students who are coming from across the university, including the Kellogg School of Management, to help us think about how to package this in a compelling way, people who know game design, people who know what will keep users in the game and not have them feel like they're losing it prematurely. I'm thinking about adults now or people who are coming to this from the Internet in general. They're not being introduced to this in a classroom setting. How do we make this something that people would want to even do?

52:32Why would I even submit myself to playing around in this world? Have you put any thought into how do we compel people to just give it a go? Have you heard of Wordle? I think the bar is quite low for getting people to spend five or ten minutes doing a thing for a dopamine hit or two. And that's where I think we can work on the intellectual goals and societal goals of cultivating scientific literacy.

53:04And packaging it in a way that people could take five minutes or ten minutes out of their day or out of their week for the next bank of questions to drop. Something that I think I feel deeply and is one of the reasons that I've connected so much with Brad on this topic and something you said about shame is that I don't think the purpose is take this quiz and prove that you're right about the moon landing or anything out. That this is for people who want to be curious and want a safe place to be curious.

53:40So, like, when you said shame, it really struck me on the way I heard it was shame around being wrong. But I think, especially in an environment like Northwestern and certainly science and whatnot, there's shame. It's not so much shame as I can't let people know how much I don't know. The intellectual humility is not considered positive so that what you don't know is considered a negative and creating a space where the sheer fact of not knowing is actually the good thing and the curiosity thing

54:14and the way to step forward and learn and engage that it's okay to want to know or to not know or to be challenged or to change your mind or any of these things. This is another reason why I need more time to hang out with Patty and talk about this game because I think when I was trying to give you a quick rundown of how it might work and I was saying you might get an answer wrong and then be offered the opportunity to learn more, right, we haven't talked through the scoring of the game.

54:45I can imagine a world where you get positive points for answering a question correctly and you might get as many, maybe even more positive points if you get something wrong but continue to click through those articulations of I want to know why I am wrong and can you show me a credible source so that I might know more by the time I'm done with this game. Before I parted ways with Patty and Brad, I asked them both why they were so passionate about this,

55:19so confident this was something worth pursuing. Disagreement is not the problem of our day. It's the affective polarization that is associated with disagreement. So we've got to figure out what's baby and what's bathwater and you don't just flip a switch on that. You need to give people easy and early opportunities to clear the lenses and to be able to distinguish what's good, what's bad because the point of the Lidowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement

55:49isn't to find some consensus around a mushy middle. Sometimes disagreement is what you need for the real progress and without training people in what I like to refer to as pre-disagreement activities, which is the curiosity, the intellectual humility, you're not setting them up to be successful when they need to navigate a real disagreement around a moralized issue. And if games get us going with 15- and 16-year-olds, but it turns out that 50- and 60-year-olds like to play it too in the New York Times app,

56:23it seems like a win all the way around. I love learning science with the students I teach science writing and journalism to. Patty Walter teaches a writing for consumer audiences class for STEM and Ph.D. students. Some days it almost feels selfish that I have a room of 18 Ph.D.s from all across the university and I have this bird's eye view of all this amazing research that's going on. And I also am painfully and passionately aware of the gulf between what the average journalism student,

57:04like not even talking about the public, like the worlds I know, the average journalism student who's not in science doesn't understand about science, but also the world in which the Ph.D. students have to inhabit and how that world also prevents them from being able to share this amazing stuff they're doing with the world. The need to bring those worlds together can create all kinds of curiosity and excitement and engagement.

57:38My own kids will tell you how annoying it is almost every dinner table conversation. I'm like, oh, I have a student who's working on that and I can talk about like what's happening in the world. But these very fundamental ideas of any given study is just a data point on a continuum of knowledge. And foundational bench science is so crucial and that we do that at a university because you wouldn't have an electric vehicle if there weren't 50 years of people at universities painfully for no extra money or patents or anything, figuring out electricity and batteries in a new way.

58:11And how can the especially university scientists and university student scientists make it sexy and exciting to explain why they push a button all day in a dark lab just to place a little bit of knowledge onto this thing that might become a greater enterprise. And to the journalism students who want, who are trained in news judgment and media to have the headline with the exclamation mark, the cancer cure, the, you know, life found on a planet, all that kind of stuff.

58:44And to say in a world in which that's not actually what we find every day in science, but there's so many exciting things. We are finding your job as journalists is to also understand that continuum. And if I can get both sides to understand their job is to make that enterprise exciting and how to have that conversation and that there are rules and norms and, again, science literacy and all of this that allow that understanding to happen, then we do this huge service to the public. And in the United States, our citizens are paying for a lot of that science.

59:17So how do we bring these groups together to get this world and this message out there in a way that feels not like why haven't scientists figured this out yet, but isn't it cool that they're doing this thing so that they can figure out that other thing someday? So even as I'm talking about, I want everybody to do this together. I'm also recognizing, and this goes right back to the game, that everybody has this fear of not appearing smart enough and it means they don't engage. So how do you pave the path to curiosity by giving people steps and tools to do that?

1:00:09Let's return now to the pilot program at the Center for Enlightened Disagreement, at the Lidowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement at Northwestern University and sit down with faculty directors Eli Finkel and Nurka Talley to get a grand overall debriefing of how it went, what they learned, and what they see on the horizon. This is Professor of Management and Organizations at Northwestern, Nurka Talley,

1:01:01with an overview of what this center is. So yeah, the Center for Enlightened Disagreement is really our attempt to get a better understanding of and have a useful impact in the domain of how to sharpen people's understandings of their disagreements, how to make people confident and comfortable in engaging on political and moralized issues in such a way such that they can really understand the substance of where they disagree and also feel comfortable wading into conversations where they disagree in ways that are forthright

1:01:33and move the conversation forward. And this is Professor of Psychology Eli J. Finkel. Same question. Disagreement is a great thing. We're leaning in. We're not trying to create a bunch of centrists. We're not trying to make everybody just be nice. We want people to advocate forcefully for the things that they believe in. But our society is not really functioning effectively along those lines, and we think disagreement can be a lot better, and that society as a result could also be a lot better.

1:02:04Second question. Now that they've gone through the pilot program, what were some surprises? I think one of the things that surprised us and also delighted us is the engagement from the students. There's a stereotype about the kids these days that they're unwilling to engage, they're unwilling to communicate openly, especially about really difficult topics. They're obsessed with their phones, right? There's a lot of stereotypes about that. And in this pilot year, we got a couple hundred students. We have them in several different cohorts, and they show up.

1:02:35Almost every time they show up, and we ask them to do difficult things. We ask them to develop critical thinking skills. We ask them to develop better listening skills. We have them talk about really contentious issues. On a couple rare occasions, feathers really did get ruffled. And I was just so impressed with the students here in terms of their eagerness to engage and how well they tackled it once they got involved. Students were super plugged in, like Eli's saying. I think that throughout, not only did they show up, they rolled with it.

1:03:06We asked them. This program was very experiential. Every single one of the modules, they were doing stuff, and they were having to share out and report and engage with peers of theirs that had different opinions on meaningful issues. And at every stage, people were present. They were engaged. They were doing their best. Third question. And this is actually something I shared with the students. It's an old journalism trick. This seems hard. Always a good question to ask in any interview. This seems like a hard thing to do. Why put so much effort into it, especially for people who have a whole academic career

1:03:41that they have to deal with and put up with and juggle and spin plates? This seems hard. Why do this? I grew up in a society that was divided along sectarian lines, where the whole was not necessarily greater than the sum of its parts, where a lot of that conflict ended up causing real damage to the society as a whole. And I believe that it is important to be able to both have the difficult conversations,

1:04:12but also have them in ways that are constructive. I believe that it's important for people to be willing to show up and actually engage. I felt that it was important to train our students to actually feel comfortable, to know that having a difficult conversation didn't mean that they had to necessarily give up on the substance of what they believed, but rather to empower them to be able to honestly present their perspectives in ways that represent them well. Yeah. I mean, if Noor's path is relatively straightforward, mine's kind of weird.

1:04:46I was always an intimate relationships researcher. I wrote a book for the general public about how to have a better marriage. I host speed dating events for Northwestern undergraduates because I'm interested in studying romantic attraction. And sometime during the first Trump administration, I actually became deeply concerned about the future of my country, partly as a partisan, but more as an American. And I just realized that we lived in different epistemic ecosystems in different worlds. And the same events meant something totally different to, you know, reds and blues or people

1:05:19with one view versus another view. And I became existentially concerned about the future of a country like that, where you don't actually share a common understanding of things. And so I pivoted pretty significantly. And my initial point of pivot was to think about America as a marriage or a nation as a marriage. And I thought, well, OK, like, let's imagine that, you know, reds and blues or, you know, conservatives and liberals or something are sort of married. We're sort of stuck here together. We made this vow to be together or we were born into it anyway. And I set myself a thought experiment, which was I tried to think, well, if I wanted to

1:05:55build the worst possible marriage, like literally the most toxic marriage I could. And I got a bunch of my marriage science buddies into a marriage lab and said, all right, what ingredients would we need to build the worst possible marriage? And, you know, it would include things like have as much contempt for your spouse as you can. Anytime your spouse does a thing, interpret it in the least generous way that you can. Surround yourself only with people who detest your spouse. And I came to this realization that we pretty much built it in a sort of congratulations America moment. I thought, well, we seem to have built basically the most toxic marriage I can imagine.

1:06:27And we call it the body politic. And we're running the republic together. And I wanted to figure out, are there ways that that we could make this better? Are there insights from the world of intimate relationships that we might be able to use to make things a little better in terms of how we manage our differences? That sounds extremely difficult. Well, that's a really that's a great thing to think of in the shower and then might be where it happened and then get in and just type it out and then send it out as a sub stack or a post or tell people over a meal.

1:06:57What do you do next after you have an idea like this or how do you find each other? How do you even start? What is step one in making a center? Well, that part wasn't too hard because Eli and I actually share an office wall. So it's literally less than a stone throw away. But no, I mean, it's interesting. We as Eli mentioned, we come from different intellectual backgrounds, right? So my background, my work really was in the world of intergroup conflict, intergroup relationships. A lot of my research was on, you know, black-white relations, Democrat-Republican perspectives or perceptions of one another, how we believe that other groups perceive our own group and

1:07:30the ways in which believing that we are dehumanized by another group can contribute to our own dehumanization of them and to cycles of conflict. So I was sort of squarely in the space. Eli was coming at it from a slightly different perspective from the intimate relationships perspective. But, you know, in the conversations that we had over the years and particularly with his growing interest and how some of those dynamics played out in our politics, we noticed that we were approaching it from slightly different angles that could be productive together, right? I really think a lot about social structure, how groups are arranged hierarchically, think

1:08:04about the group level, whereas Eli is really looking at things from the level of oftentimes a dyadic interpersonal relationship. But both of those levels of analysis have a lot to add. And so together, I think we've been able to look at the problem from different lenses, different angles in ways that I think move the conversation forward in a useful way. What is step one of actually making a center that, I mean, I've got to experience this all week, last week too, and it's working, it's happening. And months ago, I got to go to the beginning of all this and see the people you'd plucked and

1:08:34pulled. How do you even get something like this started? I'm thinking of people who are listening who are like, have ever even attempted to do anything like, oh, you pulled it off. Like, how do you step into it in a way that you've, like it had to have not like, it had to have sucked or been bad or you had to have made mistakes. At some point, it started to gain momentum. I'm wondering how you got to the momentum stage. Yeah. I mean, it started with us identifying some common interests. So even though Noor was an intergroup researcher and I was literally like a marriage researcher, one of the common grounds was motivated cognition.

1:09:06I'm sure your audience is very familiar with this idea that we have a propensity to view things in a way that is arguably self-serving or from our own perspective. And as we discovered a lot of these overlapping things, we just had more and more conversations about what it is that we're seeing in the U.S. and in other societies. And so we got together, I think, in early 2021 and we wrote, it's called a white paper, and we shared it with our dean over in the Kellogg School of Management. At that point, we thought it might be a business school-focused endeavor.

1:09:37And she started working on procuring some funding for that. And then at some point, the president of the university got very involved, basically shared the view that something was amiss in terms of society's ability, but also the university's ability to engage productively across really moralized or politicized disagreements. And so he heard about us and said, wow, that's interesting. And to fast forward a little bit, it ended up being a university-wide initiative housed in the provost's office of the university that was much more focused than we had initially

1:10:10thought on undergraduate education. That's a lot of what you're seeing is actually downstream from the fact that what we initially thought of as a Kellogg-focused undertaking ended up being a university-wide undertaking with a heavy emphasis on helping Northwestern undergraduates engage more seriously around these issues by cultivating stronger critical thinking skills and stronger communication skills. What would you say was your first success? One early success was Eli and I actually worked together on a piece for the Harvard Business

1:10:41Review, which was published in their magazine, looking at how leaders and managers could manage in an ideologically charged age. So that was sort of nice. It was one of the first times we sat together and really thought through how some of these issues could operate at that point at the level of the workplace. But that was pretty early on in our journey. You know, it takes time to sort of secure the funding that's necessary to get a venture like this off the ground at scale. So if we were to sort of fast forward a little bit, that piece was published in 2022. I would say the most, the biggest sort of tangible win that got a lot of momentum going

1:11:13was the conference that we held, the pedagogy conference that we held in the summer of 2025. Not that we hadn't done anything in the intervening three years, but that was one of the first times where sort of as a center, after we had, you know, sort of officially launched and announced the initiative, we convened a group of something like 20 different people from across the country that were interested in and had been doing sort of pedagogy in the space that had actually been bringing people together and having them in conversation. Um, and it was just fascinating to have brought in such a different breadth of perspectives,

1:11:48everything from people doing gun violence prevention to legal scholars to, uh, science journalism, uh, as you know, well, uh, David. So that was just, uh, I think a real high watermark, uh, point. Uh, and there was a lot of magic that came out of that. It was one of those things. I've mentioned this with the students earlier. It was the Spider-Man meme was happening. We were all like, you too, you too. Like, oh, this is like, are you a specific nerd for a very specific thing that you didn't know other people were? Like, I know there's like a general thing, but I'm like really thin sliced and you were

1:12:20that person too. And we all wanted something like this to occur. We all wanted something like this to exist. And there were attempts here and there, but that was like, they figured out a way to make this actually happen. If it's going to happen, this is how you would probably do it. I mean, I think you had that realization right at the moment we had that realization. I mean, you'll notice that there were three years that were sort of glossed over in Noor's summary. And it's not that we weren't getting stuff done. We were getting stuff done, but there's a real challenge with regard to your question of like, what are the mechanics of this? There's a real cart before the horse problem of we're busy people.

1:12:54How do you build something without any staff? But you can't really hire staff if you've got like a few hundred thousand dollars here and there. You need like the major funding to make sure that you can really hire people and promise them that they'll actually have a job for, you know, on the order of at least half dozen years or more. And that pedagogy conference happened right around the time that we got our big $20 million naming gift and everything felt different. And also the topic that we were exploring, and I think the way we were exploring it resonated

1:13:26for people such that pretty much everybody we invited to that conference came. And I think you have some sense of what we're up to now. And we're very, very ambitious in the people that we're communicating with. And by and large, people hear what we're up to and can check it out online at this point and say, whoa, these people really do seem to know what they're up to. But I think you were at the ground zero moment when we also were like, OK, it's happening. It's really come together. And since then, the pace has honestly astonished me. I've been able to debrief people several days in a row now.

1:13:56A lot of things keep coming back. The students, they kept bringing up curiosity. They kept bringing up curiosity in a very specific way. However, the current information ecosystem, whether or not we're phasing out of social media the way it was for a while, there is definitely an awareness in that age cohort that the algorithms are afoot. And it feels like you're being poured into a bucket and being asked to be a bucket-shaped person. I want to be a human being. I'm like almost crying over here.

1:14:27We did kind of ruin it for them. Like, I think that they are growing up in a pretty conflictual world where the disagreement is not being handled well. And yes, that's downstream from the social media companies. But I think this is related to one of the big things we've learned since we started the center. It's something that isn't really about the certificate program in particular. But we thought early on that one of the major things we were going to do was have debates. I mean, I actually think a lot of organizations like this, that's one of the first things you'd start with.

1:14:57We need to hear from diverse perspectives. That's absolutely consistent with our ethos. And think clearly. And what are the pros and cons of the various things? And we've really put that on the back burner because debates are great. They're valuable. And there are organizations that do that extremely well. Braver Angels is one, for example. But our focus, at least thus far, is on understanding, communicating effectively, certainly also advocating for your point of view. But the way you win point taken isn't by scoring a point and the people in the circle raise flags

1:15:30because, like, you scored a point against the other side. It's, oh, that's where we disagree. You think this policy will create more death. And I think it will create more life. And it's like, great. If I had your view about that, if I had your assumption about the empirical consequences of a policy, then I would have your view, too. That's like 80 percent. I mean, I'm spitballing that estimate. But a huge amount of the time when they play point taken, they're like, oh, wait a minute. I can't even find a disagreement anymore. Or they say, I know exactly where it is. We disagree about the facts or this is something that you value and something that I value.

1:16:02That's the win for point taken. And that's not a debate. It's like a foundation for what you might want to do in order to have debate down the road. But it's like almost a necessary first step to be able to understand what is it that you are actually saying? Not the demon version of you in my head, but you as a real entity. And have I been able to hear that? And have I been able to communicate my side to you in a way that you understand? You know, to a large extent, our program actually ended up generating human connection. If I think about what did we best help instill in these students, it's the skills in order to generate human connection that actually sets the foundation to be able to have productive debate and disagreement about some of these issues.

1:16:45Like, if you don't start with good listening, if you don't start with an ability to actually hear what the other person is saying, you're going to have a very hard time having a useful disagreement. You should be a marriage researcher. Yeah, so it turns out. It turns out there's more overlap in those domains than I had always appreciated. I mean, I'll even say something very, very basic that has very little to do even with the general foundations of where we started the program with. I mean, one of the things that was almost even incidental, one of the things that ended up happening in the program is that we had pretty much representation from every single year of college at Northwestern.

1:17:22We had first-year students all the way through seniors. And one of the things that was remarkable to me is hearing how many different students reflected on just the mere pleasure that they got from engaging with peers from different years that they otherwise don't interact with at Northwestern. Or people talking about, I'm an engineering major, it was really interesting to hear the perspective of a theater major that might be in a different part of campus or goes to different clubs and groups on campus than I do. So part of the value that they got, frankly, was actually just being in spaces together and having conversations for two hours that pushed them to actually hear and learn from other people, including in those cases where those other people came from different backgrounds, had different perspectives or different educational trajectories.

1:18:05I think that's part of the reason why we've seen people so comfortable with debate. And, in fact, David, you witnessed one of the recent debriefings we had at the end of the sixth module where the students were pretty clear. They're like, we're ready. Like, take the training wheels off. We wanted to do even more of the really contentious stuff. I think it's the thing that Noor is talking about is it turns out that when you've built these basic social skills, these basic interpersonal skills, which are also relevant to other issues, like there's something of a loneliness epidemic going on.

1:18:36But these basic skills then place people in a situation where they feel comfortable saying, no, we're ready. We're ready to talk about the really heavy stuff. And they did it in this certificate program. But the sense I have is that we could have pushed further. And I think that's because of the way we started with these basic listening skills and things like that. And, you know, it's interesting, you know, as you think about the way that our center is set up, in a space that is, to some extent, crowded, we've actually really leaned into those aspects that are sort of high-touch and human connection, right? There are efforts and there are good efforts to have people have conversations about difficult issues that are AI-mediated, for example, at scale.

1:19:13And people are just chatting in a chat lobby with an AI that comes in and suggests that perhaps you might want to phrase things a little bit differently. All of that has great value. That's cool. So what we have decided, though, is really important to what we want to build at Northwestern is, like, no, actually get the people in the room together. Have them be in community with one another, not only in the six modules that we generated this year. But, again, part of the way we designed it is so that you meet other people that actually are co-located with you on campus, right, that they live nearby you so that we can actually build that community, generate a different perspective on the value of having these conversations,

1:19:46and provide opportunities for people to dig deeper, we think there's something really important in that very human touch aspect. And, frankly, in a world where the role of technology seems to be getting greater and greater, my suspicion is that the value of humans being in community together is only going to go up, not down. My great hope here is, like, this is just a phase we all lived through, and some of us got born into it, and some of us got to watch it come and go.