Greg Dunlap Welcome to This Must Be The Place, a podcast about communities and the people who build, support, and live in them. I'm your host, Greg Dunlap. Our guest today is David Dylan Thomas, a content strategy advocate at ThinkCompany in Philadelphia and the host of the cognitive bias podcast, David gave a talk this year at Confab called Conversation Design To Save Civil Discourse, and it's hard to think of a topic that's more pressing for our communities right now. So David, welcome to the podcast. David Dylan Thomas Oh, thank you so much. Glad to be here. Greg Dunlap So you're a content advocate. What does that kind of mean? What is your job description. David Dylan Thomas So I am in charge of really helping the company I work at, ThinkCompany, which is an experience design firm, really help let the world know that they are good at content strategy. You know, lead gen business development kind of role. I'm here to tell the story of you know, how we use content strategy to help our clients. Greg Dunlap So, your talk at Confab was about civil discourse and creating and designing around civil discourse. I feel like we all know what civil discourse is when we see it, but like, how would you like define conversation that is civil. David Dylan Thomas I mean, when I think civil, I think respectful, right? You have two parties and they may not agree, but what they can agree to is that each of them are human beings that are worthy of respect. There's an assumption that like ... there's a great phrase Aaron Sorkin uses in a lot you can find it in his different works and it's it's "Two people talking and one of them will say, let's assume we're both good at our jobs." I think civil discourse assumes that we're both good at our jobs. It isn't, you know, it's less likely that we're going to devolve into name calling right? And, you know, maybe even, we aren't necessarily there to try to convince the other person that we're right, so much as we're there to make sure that we're hearing each other and we understand each other's point of view. Like I think that's the ideal. But at a bare minimum, you're not going to devolve into name calling because you're not there to hurt the other person, you're there to respect the other person and to hear them out. And if both parties walk away, feeling respected, even if they don't agree at the end of that conversation, I would consider that a civil conversation. Greg Dunlap It's really about intent, isn't it? David Dylan Thomas Yeah, very much. So. Yeah. Greg Dunlap You gave some interesting examples in your talk of how to drive that. For instance, you talked about "should" questions versus "how" questions which I found really interesting. David Dylan Thomas Yeah, that's based on an experiment where you show an audience an image of a senior citizen behind the wheel of a car. And you can ask the audience, should this person drive this car? And what you will get is a policy discussion with some people saying, oh, old people are bad at everything, don't let them drive. And other people saying that's ageist, how dare you, people should do what they want. And all you're going to learn by the end of that conversation is who's on what side? Now, it turns out, you can show that exact same photo to another audience and ask them, how might this person drive this car? And what you'll get is a design discussion, right? And someone might say, well, what if we move to the clutch? Or what if we change the shape of the dashboard? And what you'll learn by the end of that conversation is several different ways that that person might be able to drive that car. All I did was change it from a "should" question to a "how" question, and you get a completely different conversation. So at a bare minimum, that's what I mean, when I think of like designing the conversation, that you get the conversation that you design for. Greg Dunlap I mean, what is it about "should"? I guess it's that should is about offering opinions and how is about offering solutions. Would you say that that's accurate? David Dylan Thomas Oh, absolutely. "Should" implies a judgement, right? "Should" implies that there's a law written down somewhere. And all we have to do is go look it up. Well, should they do that? Well, let's see what the rigid hierarchical belief system says. "How" is more about collaboration and saying, okay, I might have a piece of the puzzle, you might have a piece of the puzzle. Maybe if we work together, we can get more of the puzzle and figure out how to do this thing. It's a completely different set of assumptions that you're walking into that conversation with. Greg Dunlap It reminds me of another thing I've heard I've heard about in other communities, which is sort of the idea of directing things at yourself rather than the other person. Like "I" versus "you", like I do, I think this versus you did this kind of thing, you know. David Dylan Thomas Mm hmm. Yeah. And I feel like people also talk about working the problem and not you know, working each other, right. Like, if you focus on "Hey, we're both here to bring our perspectives This problem or issue or concept that's outside of ourselves, right?" That's less personal. It's less about ego. And it's more about you know, what you're getting rated on. How good do you look? Or did you when you're being rated on is? Did you get any closer to solving the problem? Right. And that takes the ego out of it. I think that's something that's very difficult for us when we have these conversations, because they're very tied to identity. Greg Dunlap Yeah, no, that's really interesting, like the idea that these are tied to identity about like, our visions of who we are, right? Because I feel like that's part of a big thing. And you talked about wanting to win when you're having discussions and I feel like all of that is tied together in a lot of ways in the discussions that we see happening all over the place today. David Dylan Thomas Absolutely. I mean, there's an experiment where people would hook the subjects up to an MRI machine, which could sort of tell you where the blood was flowing in the brain and kind of what parts of the brain were being activated when different concepts were introduced. And when you introduced a concept that challenged, you know, the legitimacy of their favorite politician, right? If it was a Hillary supporter and you showed me some kind of like anti Hillary content, or if I was a Trump supporter, some kind of anti Trump content, the part of their brain that lit up was the part that had to do with identity. And the idea is that when you challenge someone on their political beliefs, you're challenging them. You're not challenging them on some abstract political ideology. You are challenging them. Like when you insult Trump to a Trump supporter, you're not insulting Trump, you're insulting them. Right? And same thing with you know, a Biden supporter right? You're not insulting Biden, you're you're insulting them. So that's why our heart rates increase so much when we have these discussions is because we feel like we're being physically attacked. Greg Dunlap No, no, that's all really interesting. And you know, it kind of ties into something else that was in your talk, that's that I feel like feeds into this, which is, you know, you point out that you can actually design the applications that we use to promote civil discourse. Like you talked about Reddit versus Medium as an example. David Dylan Thomas Sure. And I think if we take the analogy of a restaurant, I mean, if you can remember being in a restaurant. I'll give you a moment to do that. But if you're in a really nice restaurant with soft music and a beautiful tablecloth, the design of the restaurant is gorgeous, and it's nice silverware. Everybody's dressed up like you. It wouldn't occur to you that here's a place where you should drop the F bomb as loudly as possible, right? But if you're in, say, a dingy bar and music's really loud, everything's kind of grimy. You might actually think that that environment wants you to drop the F bomb, right? So we're used to the idea of the environment affecting our conversation. When it comes to online, the same thing is true, right? If you look at Medium, there, there's this pristine typography and spareness and the sort of elegance and these cool greens and blues and it makes you feel like I should really up my game here. If I want to respond to a comment or something, or if I want to post something. In fact, they don't even use the word post, they use the word publish, which all on its own feels more important than just a post. If you look at Reddit or YouTube, the comments section there, it looks like someone hacked it together in GeoCities. Zero design influence, right? That place, like, the vibe I get off of that is we put no effort into how this place looks. So you need to put no effort into how you conduct yourself here. Greg Dunlap I mean, one of my my pet kind of topics for the last several years is that people involved in technology don't design things with intention towards how they're going to be used. And this feeds into that. We're creating these platforms for interaction with no intention towards the types of interaction we are promoting or making happen. David Dylan Thomas Well think about the user story that went in into creating those two comment sections, right? It feels like the user story that went into creating the YouTube comment section was "I want to be able to talk about and respond to the content I see so that I can feel good about myself" I mean, really, that is how a lot of that comes off. And you can almost imagine that there was another clause in the user statement or the user story for Medium, which would be something like "As a Medium user, I want to be able to comment and respond to what I see, so that I can be heard and contribute to a beneficial pro-social conversation." There was some extra clause around the type of conversation that they wanted to have there. If you look at design justice, and a lot of other movements that are kind of around inclusive design, a lot of them are saying that. It's another version of talking about designing with intent. Not just "I want the user to accomplish this task" but "I'm also going to think about the outcome of this task at a social level", right? At a societal level. At a policy level. What is actually going to happen, if it becomes easy to do this thing? That's a really important question that we forgot to ask when we were so busy making it easy to do things. Greg Dunlap I think it speaks to a lot of the things that we use to measure success, right? Because we're used to looking to measure success around things like engagement, and numbers and charts to feed up to the VCs, right? You know, like, we got this many comments, or we got this many interactions and stuff like that. But none of that is qualitative. David Dylan Thomas It's what Erika Hall likes to call shareholder centered design, over user centered design. And I think she nails it on the head, because we can't have these conversations without really talking about capitalism at some point. Greg Dunlap Yeah, sure. David Dylan Thomas Why do I design it this way versus that way? It's because you know, you have in your head, oh, I will get more clicks if people are angry, right? I will get more clicks. But people are yelling at each other on my platform, so it isn't necessarily true, right? There's all sorts of science around, like, what motivates people to share content, and anger does it but then so does wonder and hope. So that's kind of suspect. And then the notion that a lot of this is driven by wanting people's eyeballs so that you can sell ads against those eyeballs. There is no science to support that online ads work in the sense of "Oh, yeah, I sold this many ads, and therefore I shipped that many more products or got that many more customers." There's a whole other conversation we can have around something called selection effects. But the long and the short of it is, hey, you have that ad there. Do you know that if you didn't have that ad there people wouldn't just find your product organically because they were still searching for shoes ... maybe they would have found shoes anyway. And every time they've done experiments around this, there's a famous one where Bing and I think it was eBay were having a fight. So eBay stopped selling ads on on Bing for a couple weeks. During the time that there were no ad results for eBay, the ad driven links obviously went down. But then the traffic from organic links went up by the exact same amount. Really, you've been wasting millions 10s of millions of dollars. And then, you know, the online industry went to back just doing the same thing. It's a whole thing. But the point is, what's driving us from a capitalist perspective to design for conflict isn't even necessarily a good idea. It's not even good capitalism. We just think it is. Greg Dunlap Yeah, and of course, when you're designing things that way you're opening them up, as we've seen so often in the last several years, to be gamified. David Dylan Thomas Oh, yeah. Like the incentives ... if Facebook didn't work the way Facebook did, there would be no point in Russian trolls coming in and trying to game it. I talk about a platform called polled is Polis. And it was used by this amazing group in Taiwan called vTaiwan, The short version is that there was a bunch of protests in Taiwan and the government actually decided to work with the protesters and came up with this approach to policy that would let them sort of crowdsource ways to talk about an issue in a civil way, and then turn that into implementable policy initiatives. One of the key steps in that process was to put a bunch of opinions out to the public. But the masterstroke is they would put the opinion out, and it might be something like, "I believe that Uber drivers should have to get a license to be Uber drivers." Rather than have a reply button there where people could then sort of, say something terrible, crazy as trolls do. There was no reply button, all you could do is say yes or no or pass. And you could then post your own solution. The power of removing that reply button. that design decision is incredible. Because now if I want to troll you by posting some hateful reply, I can't because there's no reply button. Or if I want to post something hateful, just to get a bunch of outraged replies, I can't because there's no reply button. All you're doing is driving people closer and closer to towards some kind of solution because you can take the yes and the no and start to understand, okay, well, all these people agree to this one, or all these people in Group A and Group B agree to this other one. If you really want different groups to agree, you have to be more nuanced and subtle. So there's all sorts of design decisions that went into that platform in that process which deliberately aim toward consensus and nuance and move away from trying to win the argument or trying to be bombastic or extreme. Greg Dunlap It's interesting, when I heard you describing that, that was the exact thing I was thinking of. It's that it's that it's going to drive towards consensus, it's going to drive people towards towards finding something that works for the most number of people. David Dylan Thomas Yeah, and it's very hard to game that system as an outside political agent, you know, meant to disrupt, because all you can really do as a bot is say yes or no. I don't know how that's going to really, you know, help you versus Hey, I'm going to post some inflammatory stuff here and get people really enraged and spread a lot of misinformation. Greg Dunlap Another thing I've been thinking about, especially as it goes to the internet, is that people have talked a lot about anonymity and how the decision of a platform or a community of some type to anonymize their users plays into the lack of civility and discourse. Have you found that to be true? David Dylan Thomas So this is actually a myth, and we know because so many platforms where you use your real name, have horrible, horrible discourse. So the famous example is Monica Lewinsky gave a TED talk a few years ago. On Ted, when you comment, you have to use your real name. That comment thread is one of the most toxic things ever posted to the web. So much so that they for the first time ever, basically had to shut down the comments section on TED. and then they posted a whole blog post about why they did it and what the implications are. The misconception is that when you are online posting, you are worried about how people see you and therefore less likely to use your name. That's gonna influence how you post. What's actually been shown to influence how you post isn't how you see yourself, but how you see the other person or really whether or not you see the other person. So, Trisha Prabhu is an amazing story. This was a 14 year old who got entered into the Google Science Fair with a project called ReThink. And what it did was it would detect when you were about to post something terrible. So you try to post something hateful to let's say, Twitter, and it would sort of realize from the language this was probably a hateful statement, and it would pop up right before you actually it actually posted it and it would say, "Hey, it looks like what you're about to post could be hurtful. Are you sure you want to post it?" Now in her trial run, and this is with adolescents, right? Not exactly the most, you know, impulse control savvy group. I think 97% of them didn't post. And yes, that leaves 3% or less saying "I want to hurt somebody", but 97% of them basically weren't evil, they were thoughtless, right? It didn't occur to them that there was a human being on the other end of that platform. And these were people who were using their real names. So it isn't whether or not you see yourself when you're posting, the real question is, do you understand that there's a human being on the other end when you post. That's the thing that's going to influence whether you're civil or not more than anonymity. Greg Dunlap It's interesting, because, this ties into this topic we brought up a little bit earlier, but like, technology solutions to human problems, or human solutions to technology problems, or this interaction of humans and technology. It really seems like... one there are things that people could be doing that they're not, but also be there is a level of this that is just human nature that we have to figure out how to deal with. David Dylan Thomas Yeah. And I think that there's a misconception around technology. This just comes from my training, but I am trained to think of technology as the how. I have a thing I want to do. How do I do that? The How is the technology. So to me, language is a technology. It was developed thousands of years ago, in multiple ways, there's multiple versions of it. But it was there to help do things like coordinate a mammoth hunt right? A way to communicate with you something. So I'm going to invent this thing. So you know, a stick can be technology. These days, we tend to think of tech as something that is digital, like we tend to, you know, make that digital versus analog. And you know, the fact of the matter is, you're always going to be using technology to solve human problems. The question is, when you are developing that technology, how much do you understand about humans? Right? So to me, it becomes more about thinking about what is the makeup of a design team, right? Is it just people who understand the technology? Or is it also made up of people who understand the humanity and who understand the history? I would love to have a historian on a tech team, I would love to have a behavioral scientist on tech team, I would love to have a civil justice, social justice worker on a tech team, People who understand people are just as important to the outcome of that design, as people understand design. That to me is kind of where you want to go with that whole humans versus technology thing. It's more, well, you need both, right? Greg Dunlap Yeah, I feel like I see some of that starting to change but I also feel like in the largest platforms that we're discussing, that turning those ships is going to be very difficult. David Dylan Thomas Yeah. and honestly, I don't know. I see it could kind of go in two ways, right? Like, this is gonna get complicated. So I see progress kind of on two tracks. I'll use the the Oscars as an example. So there's the #oscarssowhite campaign, which is sort of beautifully pointing out that yes, in fact, Oscars are so white. One of the ways the academy tries to deal with that is to change the makeup of its heavily old, heavily white voting body. And you start to see some back and forth with that. You have Moonlight winning, and all these great nominations happening ... and then it goes back to being something super white the next year. It's a lot of back and forth, but it's very slow. Because you're right, it is very hard to change old institutions. At the same time, you have a track that's around saying, "Why do we need the Oscars? Let's just have our own damn awards." If you look at like something like ... I swear to God ... this is true of the MTV Movie Awards. They were giving out awards for same sex kisses long before the Oscars. This was a thing, right? It's a different generation saying, let's make our own thing. And I feel you kind of need both. Because there's this weird tension of it really being important when we get our first you know Black Director winning. A Black person winning for Best Director like ... which I don't get how that hasn't happened. When we get that, that's going to be a big deal. But it also needs to be a big deal to say, wait, we can build our own institutions that aren't founded on the notion of inequality, that aren't founded on and built from notions of slavery. So I feel like at an institutional level, it's the same thing. You're going to have Facebook ... and how long and how it survives, there's all sorts of factors that go into that. But it was founded with a very, very, very capitalist intent, like traditional exploitative capitalist intent, and it's going to be very hard to shift that if at all possible. Then you have something like let's say DuckDuckGo, which was founded with a privacy as its founding principle. And it's a working business model, right, this thing makes a very good amount of money. But it was GDPR compliant on day one, right? It does not suddenly shift gears because the world is changing. It already decided what its values were and they were a different set of values. Now, how that plays out, you know, do you have those that rise? How long is all that going to take? And how is that actually gonna play out? I'm not sure because there's this complex layer over all of this. Going back to our discussion of what happens when change happens quickly and slow? A lot of social change seems to happen quickly. But you find out, no, you've been just sort of like putting stuff on the camel's back for decades. And now you finally put that last straw on the whole thing collapses. Greg Dunlap Like that's basically happening right now. David Dylan Thomas And I want to be very cautious around that because you know, like, Black skepticism is a thing that has been well earned over centuries of false promises. So yes, I would love for that to be true. And there is evidence to suggest that this would be like that. But that could be where it's sort of like, hey, this is not the first Black man who's been killed by the cops. But we've had a whole bunch of work, real hard work being done by the Black Lives Matter movement over the past decade. Right. I don't want to discount that. And we have a rare set of circumstances where people have nothing to do. Greg Dunlap No, no, that's a very, very interesting and cognizant point. David Dylan Thomas Right and far less to lose than usual. All of us to say this could be that sort of catastrophic tipping point where the boat can't write itself anymore, because just too much has happened. And again, you could see that happening with a Facebook, with an Amazon, do we get to the point where those companies have so much weight in one direction that the the tip is catastrophic? I don't know. I really don't know. I would love to sort of catastrophize in favor of the downfall of some of these companies or to force change on some of these companies. But, but the truth is, it's complicated. Greg Dunlap Yeah, I mean, you're right, these companies are here to stay, at least in the short to mid term, I think we all know. And it really does seem like there needs to be some mix of ... I had a discussion recently with somebody who worked in federal government around the time that Trump was hired, and a big topic there was "Can we continue to work in federal government under this administration?" There's an idea that you can't just abandon these things, right? Everybody of conscience saying "I'm out of here" doesn't help anything. They need people on the inside advocating for change. On the other hand, we also need people out in the streets. It seems like both of those things have to happen. David Dylan Thomas Yeah, and it's complex because you know, you can't tell from the outside when something has become so corrupt that it can't be saved. So you look at the police force in Camden, New Jersey, that had become so corrupt, and they had budget shortfalls that got to the point where the thing that made the most sense, or at least the thing that you could get political will behind (and that's a whole other factor is political will) The thing you could get political will behind was, just basically fire everybody and then rehire the ones who don't suck. Which is essentially what happened and then, I mean, going back to intent, fund with intent, right? So in a sense, they defunded the police but in a sense they then refunded the police but with a completely different operating system as it were. Where it was okay, the goals now, and the role of police is going to be defined in part by the community. Like one of the master strokes they did was to say okay, we are going to rehire, but in order to be rehired, you need to be trained in this, that and the other. Here are the the the metrics around how you need to qualify or the hoops you need to jump through, and they let the community decide what some of those hoops were going to be. They said to the community, what do you want police to be like, and then that became the template for ... OK if you want to get rehired, you need to be like this. That, to me is what a healthy or at least healthier interaction between the police as an institution and any community that they're policing needs to look like? Right? Because now you're thinking not about some sort of, I don't know. hyper masculine, super capitalist or warrior kind of approach to policing. Instead you're thinking about, there it is again, not making it about identity but making it about "Okay, what's the problem we need to solve here?" A community has these needs. How do we solve for those needs? In some cases, it makes sense for it to be a person showing up with a gun. But for most of them that isn't going to help. So how do we think about all these other needs that we've been assuming the person with the gun should be in charge of, but in fact, maybe it's about putting some money towards all these other needs. And maybe that looks like not someone who needs to show up in response to a crisis, but a fundamental system that provides in a way where the crisis never happens. That's the discussion that I think is really interesting right now. How much closer we get to systemic change that makes some of these, you know, that makes the the police in the modern sense of the word obsolete, right? Because now people aren't in a position where it makes sense to do dangerous shit. Greg Dunlap And you know, that stuff all ties back to one of the reasons why I found the topic of talking about communities and how we manage and build communities, interesting is because all of this stuff is tied up to what do we want our communities to be and look like, or have we even thought about that question at all? Right? And yeah, you can't isolate or separate the two. If you design something without the intent of supporting or with the intent of supporting x, then you're not going to be supporting y. And I find that so many of these, whether it be the police or the platforms that we work with online or whatever, are designed for an intent to support someone who is not really the communities that they, on the face of it are built to serve. David Dylan Thomas Absolutely. I was talking to a friend the other day about like the difference between incremental change and not. And the example I was using was, if you imagine that, you know, America is built on an operating system. America has an operating system, right? And we have all this new software, we would have run that's more just. But the problem is it doesn't run on the operating system. It's like, we want to run this apple software, but our we've got a Windows OS, if this isn't gonna work, you have to use a different operating system for any of this software can actually run. So, you know, if you have, God bless him, but if you have Biden suggesting "What if they just shot him in the leg?" Okay, that's software that works with the current operating system. So yeah, we can do that, but it's not really gonna ... whereas, oh, let's actually reconstruct how we fund and what we optimize for in our policies. And instead of optimizing for capitalist outcomes and concentrating wealth, for a very few, what if instead, our policy was aimed towards health and wellness. What if that's the metric our policies were being measured on? What if that's the thing that we knew people were going to vote for? So we have to make sure that we're keeping our voters happy that way versus keeping a small group of corporations happy. That's a different operating system. That is that is not how we optimize for policy right now. What if we did, in fact, like the step that Taiwan took and saying, hey, the students... I'm talking about the students had literally occupied parliament, right? If this was America, they'd be bringing out the tear gas faster than you can imagine, especially if they weren't white. This thing would be over. No, we'd be bloody and violent. And instead, Taiwan says, "Oh, you know what, I think you have a point there. Why don't I make you, the leader of this movement, part of the government, and we're going to work with you." And you get this thing like vTaiwan, which is able to create very nuanced, subtle. implementable ... that's the other factor is practicality. Implementable policy, right? Just to give you an idea of where this all went. So one of the first things that vTaiwan tackled was ride sharing, and they use that approach I told you where there was no replies, it was just figuring out who agreed with what. And eventually they found statements that every group agreed with, and there were statements like, the five star rating system, we think taxis should have the same five star rating system as Uber does. Because we think that's one of the things that makes Uber a good service. Where they eventually landed was, we're going to put Uber technology in taxis. And this solved all sorts of problems. It was something that everybody agreed with. And it's a relatively, if you think about it, relatively subtle, nuanced solution that you would never get to in a Facebook group. You would never get there with Congress yelling at each other. Again, it goes back to that "should" versus "how". You would just get a bunch of people yelling back and forth. Yes, Uber, no Uber, that's it. That's the only solution that would be on the table. But because vTaiwan optimized for consensus and nuance, they both arrive at a solution that actually made everybody relatively happy. Which ... how often does that happen here? Greg Dunlap I feel like we got we went from a conversation about about discussions and got way bigger picture than that for a second. Which is great, because like I said, all this stuff is tied together. But to get back to the whole civil discourse conversation, one of the things that I think we see a lot in our day to day lives, is we come upon discussions or other types of discourse that, you know, they've already started and gone down the rabbit hole of becoming uncivil. What techniques do you have for people to kind of bring those back out into some level of sanity where we're we're focused on good intent rather than rather than yelling at each other. David Dylan Thomas I mean, it kind of depends what you want. There's some groups where if someone can't agree to, like the principles of a civil discussion, I'm not sure there's much you can do like the best you can do honestly. And again, this depends on your goal, right? So Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks about when people have disagreed with her. And her intent in that moment isn't to convince them otherwise, because she knows that doesn't work. She knows that they're coming from a very emotional place. And she knows that fundamentally what they want is to be heard. And so what she focuses on in that conversation, is just making sure that she hears them, and it's clear to them that she hears them. And in those rare cases where those folks have changed their minds, one of the things they cite is the fact that they walked away from their interaction with her feeling heard. They didn't change their minds in that moment, that happens later. Before any kind of movement is possible, you need to make sure that person gets heard. Now, there's a lot of people where I don't want to hear them. It is gonna cause me great emotional damage to hear them with no real good outcome. So if if the outcome you desire is a civil discussion, there may simply be people who are not ready for that. And if you were prepared to play the long game of "I'm going to hear you and get us to a point where we're ready to talk to each other" And you have that capacity. That's great. There's another story where Sarah Silverman, this is years ago, Sarah Silverman was on Twitter, and someone used some very horrible language with her. And instead of blasting back, she looked at that person's Twitter history and kind of looked at what they posted and was able to basically ascertain that this person was having some mental health issues. Having some really difficult issues taking care of, I think their elderly mother. And she was able to reach back with compassion and say, "Hey, it sounds like you're going through a lot." And really just tried to meet them where they were, and she had the patience to do that and the resources to do that and God bless her. But her intent in that moment wasn't to put that person down, her intent in that moment was to connect with that person. So if that's what you're going for the folks who are so far gone, and so like locked into their ideology and their rage, I think that's the best you can hope for. But to actually have that civil discussion, I think there are some prerequisites. I sort of call them the the rules of productive discourse. And one is that both parties need to agree that neither of them has the answer. We walk into a lot of these conversations, thinking that well, I know what's right for the country. I know how to fix Coronavirus. I know how to fix racism. I know what you should do. And if that's your attitude, it's already over, you're not gonna have a civil discussion because all you're going to do is advocate for your position. You're not going to listen, because you don't think you have anything to learn. Greg Dunlap You're more interested in winning. David Dylan Thomas Exactly. Which brings us to our next rule, which is neither of us is going to win. We have to agree that we're not here to win an argument. We have to agree that we're here to learn and to fix. And then the final rule is we're here to create something new. Right? And that assumes that each of us has something to bring to the table that assumes that each of us are good at our jobs. That we're gonna build something new, which again focuses not on my ego or your ego but instead it focuses on, what's this thing we're making? What's this thing we're collaborating on? It's very artistic really. Greg Dunlap It sounds like you're saying that one of the biggest things in determining if you even can bring a conversation back into the realm of civility, is to make sure that that is actually the intent of the people who are involved. Because if it's not, then your chances of success are very low. David Dylan Thomas Yeah, I mean, if we can't agree to those terms, then you probably don't want to have a civil discussion, what you want is to yell. Which I get it. Yelling is necessary, right? We need to yell sometimes. But that's a different discussion. And again, if we agree, that's what we want to do. Great. Let's go yell at each other. Did we yell? Great mark that off as success. Now, let's move on to the next thing. I think the problem occurs when people walk into those conversations with different agendas and I'm here to have a discussion but you're here to yell. Okay, maybe we need to go to different rooms. Greg Dunlap If I'm here to be civil, and you're here to yell, then maybe it's an active decision on my part to say that I don't need to be involved in this because nothing good can come of it. Well, this has been really, really great and interesting. This is the second time I've seen you speak at Confab and both of them were completely fascinating and I really appreciate you coming on to talk to me today. Where can people find you on the on the various places that people are finding you and what do you have that you're working on? What's coming up in the near future? David Dylan Thomas Sure. So you can find me at daviddylanthomas.com and you can look me up on the interwebs on twitter at @movie_pundit. Right now I'm working on a book called Design for Cognitive Bias. It's being released by A Book Apart in August. If you go to david daviddylanthomas.com, you can sign up to get updates about that. But I'm gonna be talking in that book about a lot of the stuff we talked about today. Greg Dunlap That sounds amazing, and I cannot wait for it to come out. Really looking forward to it. So thanks for joining us today. I really appreciate it and I can't wait to hear more from you soon. David Dylan Thomas It was great. Thanks so much for having me. Greg Dunlap Thank you for listening to This Must Be The Place. You can find out more about the show and subscribe at lullabot.com/podcasts. You can find me on Twitter as @gregddunlap. Our theme song was composed by Will From America and our logo was designed by Marissa Epstein. This podcast is produced by Lullabot, providing large scale publishing solutions using Drupal. Thanks for listening. Transcribed by https://otter.ai