conveyed to the ukrainians that this money is the last money in. there's a needhost: this is aar, virginia. good morning. caller: good morning. i like a lot of what you're talking about. it sounds like our backgrounds are sort of this line as well. but i want to give you a question first.

what public office have you held before, if you have and if so -- >> hello, welcome to all of those of you who braved the weather to come join us today and also to our online all of a sudden. we really appreciate you joining us. i'm tara watson, i direct the center for economic opportunity here at brookings. i was asked to join a project. it was under the auspices of the convergence collaborative and the goal was to discuss policies to support working families and i quickly learned that this approach was really serious about bringing together people from across the ideological spectrum and about facilitating productive conversation so several dozen of us spent quite a bit of time for the past year producing a report. you'll hear a bit about that

today, especially in the first panel bull then because the process was so unusual, i wanted to give people the opportunity to hear more about work across the spectrum more generally. so our second pan panel will be focusing on productive ways to do that. we have two panels. we'll only have time for a few questions but i hope you all will stay for the reception at the end of the event outside and continue the conversation there. before i touch things over to abby. i'm going to introduce all of our fannists, starting with the second panel, which is called finding common ground on bowl rising issues. stewart butler, a senior fellow in economic studies here at brookings. before joining brooking, he spent 25 years at the heritage foundation, vice president of

economic and policy studies. miah mcginns will also be on the second panel. she is the president of the bipartisan committee for a bipartisan freshman bunt. she oversea ever sees the fix the debt coalition and fix u.s., which seeks to better understand the root causes of our nation's divisions and deteriorating politics. -- is executive president of american banker foundation. she previously was the c.e.o. of united way world widerd. she expanded their world wild community efforts. our second panelist will be jessica gross, an opinion writer for "the new york times." she joins the times as a founding editor of the parenting section in 2018 and then moved

on to the opinion section in 2021 and she is the author of "screaming on the inside: the unsustainability of american mosh hood." before we hear from that wonderful group, we'll have the first panel, four areas areas of common ground for working families, which will be moderated by molly, a fellow here in the brooksings group. she examines the future of work and load waist works, especially for women and people of color. she is also adjunct faculty at georgetown university. guzman is the director of hispanic institute. she is responsible for increasing cal trance impact and leading strategic business development. she is principal investigator of the national research center on

hispanic children and families where she oversees a large research gerund across poverty, economic self-sufficiency and othercies. the third person on the panel will be josh mccabe, the director of social policy at the m.s. cannon center. previously assistant prior of soldier and wrote a book in 2018, the physicallization of social policy. and last but not least, i'll introduce abby, who directed the project with convergence on supports for working families. she's found of the founder and principal of research of mccluskey policy l.l.c. and was previously director of american policy at the institute. she's going to lead us off with a few remarks overall before we

get into our panels. please join me in giving them a warm welcome and i hope to talk with you more at the reception. [applause] >> thank you so much, tara and to all of you for being here. so appreciative. and in 2017ist a member of the brookings working group on paid leave with e.i.i. that taught us several things, one was the power of rhythm. some are part of this effort and the other was the power of a bipartisan group to develop something new and not just to reduce it to the lowest common des moines nateor. those warnings carried over into there project and i'm so

grateful for that. how to support young families with kids has been the heart of my work. i've done research policy the last 15 years and i have three young children myself. 8, 6, and 3. i've long felt there's something in our culture that rushes up against parent hood. that makes it hard every than it needs to be and in many ways more challenging then january -- than generations ahead of us. we see this in the rare and shrinking budget that goes to children. people citing costs, and books like family unfriendly and the anxious generation. the aim of our convergence project was not to rename those challenges or to embark on new research. rather it was to bring together leaders and family policy across

political ideologieses to find common bound two. where we're talking about build back better or the overturning of roe v. wade. there is a large organizational chas will between them. this project was about convergens taking a step to bridge the gap between family policy in particular. we chose numbers from the collaborative first and foremost based on their expertise in the area of children and families but the second cry tear aye was choosing people who we knew had deep political differences, who appear on opposite opinion pages in our major papers and we wanted to include our think tank voices but diversify-out to include nonprofits, physicians and folks from different parents

of the country. our group of 32, on verge of manageable, melt monthly over the course of the year. we had a an intermediatuation team to keep things civil and i often joked that our meetings felt like couples therapy and we intentionally waited before jumping too policy, which is very hard for policy people to do but we started by building a framework for family flourishing and i think this ended up being one of the most powerful parts of the report. it talks across across party lines and brings in other dimensions, such as connectiveness. government solutions are part of it. we'll talk about them but not all of it. we also had recommendations if communities and philanthropists and these fall into four mainly

sections. the first is changing the story. the last national pulse we had on child well-being was in 1991. the published aren't of the national commission on children. had been steined into law by reagan in 19 7 and the title of the report was beyond rhetoric with the sub text being enough talking, let's get on to fix these things and our group kept returning to the importance of language and rhetoric in nearly every conversation we had. we put forward new narratives but also recommended interventions to move families forward in our national conversation and dialogue. things like launching a public narrative campaign to raise importance about early childhood. a similar effort to this is happening in the u.k. right now. focus on new structures. this could be a family caucus or committee oren stating a

national policy on children for the 21st century and we're often looking at different data and polling extend depending on our own political leanings and organizations. the second area was reorganizing cash support for families. low to middle income families should receive more easy too access cash support. including increasing intergenerationallickity in our wasn't. reallocating a greater share of our existing spending to kids. exploring the timing of child tax crept payments to direct machine to families with more children as well as more to low-income families. one of the examples we sippet is rx killed, which is being piloted this threat, michigan, where a pregnant mom will

receive $7,500 mostly funded by charitable donations. the third area was ensuring my high-quality care options for children and this area was arguably where we had some of our largest disagreements and yet some of the most deeply held desires to break out of what can be a one seize fits all solution of either full-time center based care or stay at home parenting. our collaborative called for a new holistic agenda for new children so that parents have access to choices that align with their needs and their child's development, including making workplaces more accommodating for parents. increasing a choice through reforms and ensue suring that the existing statement -- is funded at a level that any

eligible child under the federal guidelines can receive the support that they've been promised. and the fourth and last was supporting parents with dom active children and we were able to reach our strongest language. we said the status quo around birth and infancy is not acceptable. most called for a relief plan of at least 12 weeks. and investing in more holistic prenatal and postpartum supports, whether that's increasing televisits through medicaid or increasing home visits. before i go on, i want to thank the packer foundation who invested in this project. i want to thank the leadership of the convergence team, in the back. they tirelessly do this work across all sorts of different issues.

for jeff gross who sat in on a particularly fiery session and tara and josh who i've been privileged to get to know and lastly to brookings for hosting this event. it's such a privilege to be back. thank you. [applause] >> abby, thank you so much for that amazing introduction. it was wonderful to hear what motivated you to be part of this effort and some of your previous work in bridging the divide here at brookings. i'm curious to hear from josh and lena what inspired you to join in e. and what brought you

to the -- >> yeah, i was looking at the invitation yesterday. i wanted to make sure that my memory is correct. obviously the invitation had the topic working people and working families. but the invitation stoodout in different ways. one is the idea of a spectrum and also perspective. so we have different sectors represented. nonprofit advocacy organizations. so many different perspectives brought tournament to the table was unusual. i often get invitations for technical groups or panel groups but it's often a lot of conversation and not a lot of action. and we don't really know where all the great discussions go. i see tara shaking her head. i'm pretty sure that's a familiar experience.

it was a clear operated sort of mission with group and it came with a yearlong commitment so you knew that they were serious about getting to actionable goals and recommendations so that really appeared -- appealed to me as well. >> yeah, anytime you get an invitation from abby, that's usually a sign that it's going to be a good project. i had read about different groups and organizations, but to be in the room with them and be able to talk to them in a seminar style format that was off the record. you could ask about anything, push back, add on, that's not an opportunity you get a lot, i think in war so it wasn't one i was going too pass up. >> abby laid out four main buckets of focus areas and underneath thattite a few different policy areas. why do you any it was important that this project took all of

that together holistically and that what does that say about the holistic process? abby? abby: i've been part of working groups where you go in and there's a mission to talk about child care with a policy solution and a month later you'll have a report. but the nature of this was entirely different. we had the parameters to focus on famous with young children but beyond that there wasn't a specific area of focus. i think having that brought advice of our group made all the pieces feel less big and leads to more about what government can do and philanthropy but also talking about one policy solution and putting yourself more in the perspective of what what of the reality of what families face and what would most benefit them.

molly: i completely agree. i think that where we landed was not set in stone from the outset. we had a very brood agenda but i think it was implicit in the design that we landed where we did. the idea that we would have just taken and tackled one issue, given the wild -- [lost audio] unlikely that we would have left it there. but families do not function by -- and so i think that where we landed really reflects that families do need support around -- 1 josh: what's their policy area about, right? it can sometimes feel like you're competing with other

policy areas. put them together and ask what is the strength here? the weakness here? if we do it holistically, we have to figure out what's really important. and we have that broad agreement and address it to families. thinking that way was really helpful. >> i've made some references to how unique this convergens process was. what about this process felt different from the way you would normally work individually on these topics and what were some of the hardest, most challenging but also most rewarding aspects? >> i think typically what i've seen is we take on one topic. whether it be health care, the i.t.c. so we have lots and lots of specialists in the room and i think what stood out again was

the divergence of perspective, the entries that were -- industries that were represented. 30 people, very strong opinions. i don't see how that would have been able to move forward had we not had these incredible if a -- facilitative conversations. and at the end hearing oh, we did say that, we did agree. those things were really critical. josh: i think we all go in with our policy speciality and we're ready to just talk about that and i think abby had her hands full saying no, no, we're going to talk about what kind of conversation we're going to have before we got into that. that was important to step back

from our use policy long very narrow way of thinking and also be able to talk to people off the record with nothing in particular. so usually you call somebody up -- hey, i have a new report. i want to talk to you about it or i want you to look at this, this thing i'm working on. that's helpful but it doesn't allow for those broader conversations on what are your thoughts on x, y, and z, whatever comes up from the conversation. it's more organic. >> for me i would say it was the intentional slowness that both created the space to have conversations we did and was also frustrating at times and that we did try our best to be a neutral space. again, i've been part of groups that are all conservative with a token progressive or all progressive with a tone conservative and those don't feel like really a safe place to

say what you think you do. we strove november -- to have a very balanced group. to have a private place, to meet and meet again, share meals and build relationships. ultimately those are hard to measure but i think that's what's really missing right now in some of our political conversations. >> one last question before i open it up to the audience. what would be your biggest priority for family policy coming up in the year ahead? i know we're in an election year so is there one particular issue that is top of mind for you? >> i'll start. of the three that we put forth, for me it would be childcare. i think covid really shone a light on just how broken our childcare system is and how critical it is. we know it's critical for families and working parents.

we know that it can really help children's development, high-quality child care and it's so linked to economic well-being. if you're on your way to work and suddenly your child care center is not open. some of us have the luxury of being able to work from home and for many it really means a missing paycheck that you're not making so it's ultimately tied to economic well-being. josh: yeah, i think with 2025 coming up and all the detectives around the tax panel. we're really thinking about the child tax credit and what that should look like, what it could look like and what are broader integrations to help make it a bit more spectrum and not break the bank. we want to make sure this is sustainable for families, that they have it in good times and

bad and they have it in support for the cost of raising kids. abby: i'm excited about the bipartisan, bicam ram working groups in congress for paid leave. but what i'd really like to see is reinstating of the national commission of children for the 21st century. it's been decades. the well being of children and families has arguably gotten worse. our polarization has too and i think having a bipartisan commission to address it would be a huge step forward. molly: great. do we have in i have questions from the all of a sudden for our panel? i think we have a microphone coming. >> i'm not sure if this is this panel or the next one but i'm interested, did you review the sort of flow of education as part of your process? because my daughter grew up in

montgomery county and we went through six different schools and each time there was another test or something -- nothing ever fitted and everywhere she went, from one place where she was bullied to the next. so there's something very wrong with the education system, at least for girls. >> that was something that was so frustrating in some ways about in process because education was an area we didn't have scope to get into. child poverty was an area. tech and teen mental health. we intentionally focused on young kids up through early elementary school because that is an historic area of underinvestment in the country and education is a different conversation and that would have required different people around the table to address that adequately. >> hi, great discussion and josh -- i'm a big fan of josh

too. quick question, as somebody who works around the hill. i've seen firsthand the strong coalitionings around paid leave and the child tax credit, which meant a lot to many of the folks involved in the working group. child care space, i know there's probably room for more maturity there so i'd love a bit more elaboration about the bipartisan preliminary ideas you have to rebuild that coalition building in a new area. josh: i guess i can answer. yes, i think the clap aization was really helpful in some of the relationships we built there. i have sent reached out to folks and run some different panels based on those conversations we had. it really broadened my thinking and opened those doors where we

can have broader conversations about care choices, pluralism. what do different folks need, what's possible, plausible so i think the lab a active was really helpful, particularly in that swales away space. >> in some ways even the topic of that section, creating more care options for families with children. i don't think i fully appreciated how even that language can be offputting on some of the folks on the more conservative side of the spectrum. talking about broader issue of care was something that we did in the group. molly: there was another hand. yes? [inaudible] >> it's wonderful work that's been done. the challenge is always when it gets into the policy process, there are the political precious

that folks who are having private conversations in those rooms are going to con front. just curious how you see the ability of folks, the inclination of folks who were involved to help carry this forward in that process. >> we've continued to be -- several of us continues to be in touch. josh has mentioned a couple of ways and i also think that -- i think the message of what the convergens model has done i think is also -- when i've [inaudible] the specific response that seems to help break through, we need more of that in such a polarized environment that we live in. >> i mean, i'm encouraged, we are seeing some of those bipartisan efforts happening in congress and real-time, they don't always rise to the level

of the trump-biden rematch but they're happening. there's a large group of people who want to see change in this space so continued the conversation at the federal level but there's a tremendous amount happening at the state and local level too whether it's red states, blue states or purple states. what are are the steps that the private sector can also take in helping support families. so it crossed a number of different dimensions but i think the actual ground that it's hitting is pretty fertile for reform right now. >> thanks. i'm miah mcginnens on the next panel. and i apologize because i feel like my question is not in the spirit of convergence, which i participated in and the process

is amazing but i also think it's useful to know where the kind of places you can get stuck on an issue that aren't constructive are. were there any topics that got lots of attention or were particularly 2005ive, that one -- decisive that one side liked and one didn't. >> i can't end here. i do think the child care space was particularly con ten shouse. no surprise, anyone here who follows the child tax credit negotiations were con then shouse. i think one of the pieces we ended up leaving out of the report was not including the economic implications of some of our family-friendly reforms for supporting women's work or gender actually. it got left out of the final

report because it became an area the group couldn't agree only. and had a lot of discussion about the end goal. is it for economic stability, for the adults, for the kids? ultimately if reports are child focused for the most part so it was another area that was contentious. >> and very quickly, also, there are some groups of children that we did leave all the ever off the table. for example, the fact that this is a report on working families and policies aimed at supporting work and families, so we leftout children whose families are not able to be stably employed. we did leave that out and that includes a substantial number of children who have some of the highest needs. those were some things that i still -- i read the report -- and i know nose moments and i agree with why we went from but it's still not something that i particularly love, so --

>> question in the back. >> i just wanted to follow up on the discussion. i've had one foot in the health world and one foot in the family/education world and i'm shocked by the salary difference between a nurse and a teacher and that goes to child first, etc. and you've mentioned it. can you say anything more? and did you say anything about child welfare policies and the amount of abuse of our children? which is primarily an -- and addiction. >> yeah, the latter a hugely important issue and again one of

those where the scoping of the projects didn't allow us to get into the foster system and abuse and neglect to kids and make we can do another version of it where we can. again the -- so, another area of detective was the childcare workforce and that kept coming up too. there are references to it in the report but it's not a focus and i guess that would be my answer to the question about salary disparities between a health care worker and a child care worker or at this point between a retail worker and a fast food worker and a child care worker. we went into it from the parent-chimed perspective and left from kind of exogenous in from the workforce. so that was something we didn't address in our report. >> we'd add that you're right,

the issue around wages for the early childhood -- child care workforce is a big one. it's closely tied we canty. gender but also racial equity so a large portion of the child care in our work station is our black and broken woman who historically have been underpaid. this is also a place where a lot of states are innovating. i know for a lot of states really leading the charge here in addressing this and seeing this as a necessary condition to really expand and build the child care market. >> right, i have a project here, brooksings, looking at issue us around care workforce. what is interesting with this conversation, i think there's an arguments to be made -- and i know you couldn't do everything

in one report. one career you, but this is an argument to be made that some of the benefits of raising pay for the child care work forbes is really for the families as well. this is an equity issue. it's a vastly underpaid workforce, disportion that the black and brown and women but there are child care shortages and it's very difficult for child care centers to attract a workforce but as you were referencing, abby, it often pays to go across the street to a home depot or cvs. interesting to me whether or not that was in the scope and it wasn't for lots of reasons. i'm curious if there's any sense from the conversations you had as a group of parsing the differences. there are a lot of things happening at the state and local level. including with virginia with the

governor, there's been some childcare wage inelse across. most of it is coming more from democrats but especially in child care it seems to be more partisan so i don't know if any of the conversations in your group reflected a commonality. would that maybe have been an area of collaboration and opportunity? abby: it's all excellent points. i do think that was an area that ran into -- so in child care in our group, there's a divide between point taken that they flow between the quality of the child care force and families, understood. but i felt we hit more fundamental debate about why are other people paid to watch kids and not parents. and there was a lot of tension between stay at home parenting and formal child care and we couldn't scare that circle particularly well, which is why

we ended up with creating more options. more options to stay home, more options to work part time. more care options, both with a center and with a faith-based organization or with family and friends but we were kind of down at that root of the problem and sadly didn't really -- weren't able to address the child care workforce issue specifically. molly: there's a question. >> well, this conversation is timely because today muriel bowser released her budgets where where she zeroed out augment active pay for child care workers. anyone want to offer an opinion? molly: i'm deeply disappointed by the announcement today. in fact, it was at a brookings

event that was held just a few months ago that i attended that our colleague hosted around paid leave and we listed up the example of washington, d.c. as exemplary. there's an incredible program here called the pay equity fund and d.c. has made a commitment to put child care providers on par with schoolteachers in terms of pay based on education so if you have a bachelor's degree and work in early childhood, you get the same as if you were a teacher. it means for a child care provider up to about a $12,000 or $13,000 a year bonus. it's really important in d.c. i have three young children. it left quite a disparity that we had an early childhood school based workforce that was well compensated and terribly low

paid. it's criminal in my view how low paid the child care workforce is given they're looking after our future human capital and our loved onings. i was very proud to be a d.c. residents knowing this program listed. i've talked about it to many other states and cities as one of the best examples of a state or city really investigationing in a child care workforce. i think it would be a mistake for d.c. to do this and it's very disappointing. what i would hope is to see more cities and states to this as opposed to taking away that a model to replicate. i see this as deeply disappointing news, i hospital it's not the end of the story and i appreciate your question. >> and maybe to wrap it on that, that your question. there's so much that we disagree about. solve issues that we didn't

cover or were able to reach and yet there are -- [inaudible] where there is broad agreement on ways to move forward. i would love to see the pieces where there's agreement move forward with usuallicy. >> time for one more question? >> ok, great. >> just in reference to murriel bowser and one of the main problems is the growing economic inequality that exists in this city. there's no proposals to say that people that make the most money should pay more in taxes so that we can have the available resources to provide better paid job slots for early child hood development and things like this and i was wondering whether or not that type of issue of growing economic equality was

dealt with this any of your discussions? >> the early childhood pay for teachers is actually funded by a tax on the wealth est d.c. citizens so it's an interesting example but in question of economic-- inequality or how we pay for some of these programs, was that a part of it? abby: in this case, a recommendation that we spends so much of our relative resources at the latter stages of life and so relatively little at the beginning. part of me is still conservative to say we're in a relatively unprecedented fiscal situation. raising taxes alone isn't going to do it so our report talked about allocating funds and where to do it. that's an important part of it and certain the patrolledder economic issues impact families and all of these issues.

there was a deeper level saying economics matter but also the rhythms. that families can raise kids according to their values and are resilient with their setbacks. with our group all of a sudden it became sort of everything or nothing and what duets kleined because everything kind of impacts it so some extent and what exactly are we trying to do? there are different kind of north stars we could choose. so all that is a long-winded way to see -- say that income inequality is not explicitly addressed in the report and there's lots of reasons for that but we're also trying to broaden out just beyond economics and talk about the bigger picture of being a young kid in america and it has other factors in there also. >> final question.

we're heading into an election season. there's going to be a lot of issues discussed. what about this experience gives you some hope for family policy. is there anything you're taking a away that gives you optimism? anything specific or even just the approach? >> i'm going to start with the pragmatic part. we, the u.s. has joinedded the below replacement fertility club that many countrys in europe and asia have already been a part of. i do think that we are going to have the incentive to support families with young children are going to be even more paramount because we're going to be a shrinking society. we're not going to have a work forbes to support social security, old age, so i do think that in the coming soon, hopefully, we should be seeing

greater attention to how we can support working families because of our shrinking pop place size. josh: yeah, i think i'm optimistic knowing that we had some strange bedfellows in this group and no one knew what we were doing until the report came out and all our names came out. we talked a lot about secret congress. that there are similar processes going on in congress. folks coming up with viable proposals that we don't know what they look like yet until they come out and folks jump only board hopefully. abby: the presidency clearly matters for so many reasons. i've worked on presidential campaigns but in a country as closely divided as we are, a policy that's going to have broad based support from washington, d.c. to texas, where i live now, is probably going to

come from congress as opposed from the administration because congress is always a more representative bloc of people and because there is a growing bipartisan favorite tim for these things, it has my focus on congress, on the 2025 tax package that josh referenced and on these bipartisan groups which are working. so that's what's keeping me hopeful. molly: thank you very much to our panel, that was an excellent discussion. [applause]

>> that was saw great discussion and such great round of questions. when i sat in on that multi-hour discussion i didn't know what to expect in considering school board meetings regularly involve police, breaking them up. i was nervous that it would be contentious in a way that was unproductive so i was so just impressed with the moderation, with the care and respect that everybody treated each other with and the participantses' willingness to engage in a good faith way. so your experience working in such a discussion?

>> first i want to say thank you for brookings for hosting this and for their convergens and their leadership. i think it's so refreshing today to have a conversation about reaching common ground so i think this conversation is needed now more than ever. with con vergens, i was really proud to be a board member. that started when i was pregnant with my son. he's now 6 years ed. that started about six years ago when i was asked to join a dialogue on the broken bunt process. and that was similar tort last panel. another sort of eye-opening experience on getting deep into the weeds on how to we come to a consensus on the fact that we're

constantly moving from government shutdown to government shutdown but through that experience we were able to come up with some really strong policy solutions so through that process i was really impressed by what convergence was about and it spoke to, at my core who i am is really about trying to find that common ground and joined as a board member and have been part of this work ever sense. >> thank you. i've always been a board member for many, many years of convergence and mike mia and lindsay i've been involved with a number of projects. chiefly, the budget process which mia is lindsay were both involved in but also mainly in the health care area and economic mobility and right now on social determ nantz of

health. and just to pick a few of techniques, having seen a lot of these different projects and there are certain techniques i think which are very, very important in why these projects are so important and come to discuss success. one the use of professional mediators and facilitators. the importance of that is to have somebody in the room who's constantly, as a professional, sort of watching conversation, watching the body language, taking a moment in the coffee break to just ask a question of one person and so on, to read the room in other words. so i think when abby described this as couples counseling, i think this is very, very much the case of a professional looking at people who are arguing with each other and getting to the bottom of why -- how they can find agreement and that's a very important feature and you see this in almost all

the convergens projects. secondly, the conversations often begin and certainly this is an important element, of trying to get out what are the underlying values, vision, life experiences of people actually in the room. because even if somebody has got a -- you know, a ph.d. or is a specialist in a certain area, they are still motivated by things that have happened to them and ways they see world. one of the techniques we use is to go around the room and say why are you personally interested many this issue? and you hear the stories. i've seen actuaries for life insurance companies tearing up talking about long-term care and what happened to their parents. that shatters the impressions that other people have about what this person must be like,

you know? because people come into a room and stay tend to pigeonhole people -- you're from the banks, you're -- and so on and these stories change the dynamics fundamentally. the other thing i'll say now and i'll stop is again, what abby mentioned, the projects do not just take a few days. this is a yearlong process. this is not like the kind of bargaining where you say we're all going to stay through the night here and reach agreement. we're going to lock the men's room and the women's room and you're going to have to come to agreement. it's not like that. it builds agreement over time, using the techniques i mentioned and others and that's that critical aspect of this. we can talk more about some of these techniques but taking the time is really important to get to agreement. you cannot push it too fast and sometimes you don't get to

agreement. >> mia, i'd like to hear from you about your experience working across the aisle. hearing stuart talk i do think one of the special sauces of this is that it is off the record, i think especially with social media, people can be quite wary of something they're saying getting repeated, getting spun in a certain way. i wonder if you thought that sort of affected the way people might work together in a more on the record fashion. >> great. , thank you. is this on? button, thanks. first, i are also -- is it still on? can you hear me? thank you. thank you. first, i will also sing the praises of convergens. having done the process, i wish i could live my life with one of those mediators following me

everywhere. it brings out your best behavior. i think we should awful in every circumstance pretend one of those intermediaries is behind us. it helps with your interaction. if convergens ever asks you to be part of the process, say yes. you come away much better for it. having the infrastructure that helps us get to where the yeses are is really, really important. there's going to be no durability unless it has a broad support. your question is about doing this in the read world so in congress these days, i'm trying to build support for fiscal policy. it's pretty easy. the left and the right don't support fiscal responsibility so there's that that they agree

on. so your question, about off the record, is it easier? it's so much easier. one of my co-chairs is leon panetta and he always says nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to. you can come up with certain policy agreements but you have to see the rest of them. but the problem is i don't think off the record exists anymore and i'm thinking about the capitol hill group that i'm working with right now. they trust each other pretty much. a huge piece of this is building trust, building relationship, spending lots of time together and really get getting to know one another on a personal level. empathy, understanding and human connection that only comes from time and frankly, some level of vulnerability. one of the best processes i've seen was in a different group i was working where we were around the dinner table and said what

was the worst thing that happened to you on social media? people have of had had death threats, kids being threatened. but some of those people really opened up. and it was a diverse group. so some of the ways you can builder think really matter but that trust that you have that nothing is going to get leaked. but also, i think that off the record doesn't exist. everybody says nowadays when you're thinking off the record -- you wouldn't want it on the front page of the paper but you still have to understand it could well be on the front page of the paper. i feel there's a huge loss in that. i feel somewhat connected to that loss because i spent a lot of time working on campaign finance for some time and i always felt that absolute transparency was early.

-- essential. turns out to not always bring all the benefits that you want. there are unintended consequences but i do think the solution isn't to believe that you have privacy and it's not going to get leaked. it's -- more about how you build connections to the reasons people say things is more about asking questions. >> i'm very interested in asking questions and how that seemed to be a big part of the process. it was not just fighting back with your idea. it was ok, let me pause and ask a follow-up question. in addition to what the kids call trauma bonding, which is a way to break down vulnerability, what the other ways to foster that connection and compromise among people who you know have

preconceived notion of each other or have that steyer to disagree. it's for anybody. stuart, you seemed to jump on it. stuart: i was just going to give you an example. one of the earliest prompts we did at convergens 10, 12 years ago was on k-12 education. we had people in the room from two major unions. we had home schoolers. child school advocates and so forth. we had one terrible meeting where everyone just quell yelled at each other. they focused on what's going on right now, the issues in front of congress and so on. so we went away and regrouped and said let's not talk about any of that. let's talk about your vision of what an education system should look like 20 years from now. not today. one of the remarkable things was we discovered that people's vision of the future wasn't as

different as they thought it was and we were able to kind of begin to sort of build by looking at the future. the what-if sort of scenario and then start the kind of walk back to today and do it in that sequence as opposed to let's get into what the issues are today and let's see if we can make agreement. so there are techniques like that that can get people really off of what they think of the opposition and begin at least to entertain an alternative view because you're not asking what they're going to vote for or advocate for today. you're asking them about the future. and that's a technique we've used quite often convergens projects to exchange the dynamic and get it out of the day-to-day. that's one way of dealing with what you asked about. lindsay: i'd just add on to that -- the thing that comes to

mind for me is leaning into the disfortunate and i think that -- disfortunate and i think we're -- discomfort. and i think we're awful used to leaning into things where we want to be comfortable. in places where we're with like-minded individuals and we're not often in spaces where we have to be confronted with difference is and so i think what is really valuable about this process is that it puts it right in your face. you have to connell front it and you have to recognize that your assumptions and your biases about that difference might be not what you were expecting, so i think it's leaning into the discomfort, overcoming your biases and asuchs and as maya mentioned, that comes from connecting as a human being. finding nose areas on and off in common so you can get beyond

nose assumptions. we've all seen the tech talk about our brains being machines of inference, right? we make decisions every day based on assumptions and biases but when we put those things aside, that's where the magic hams. that's >> i have two thoughts about what helps with what works and one with what doesn't work. we have this small subproject of the committee and it is looking at the root cause of dysfunction, distrust. right now, my colleague who runs this, he is in the mid-story is in the mid-stores just completing a project -- but were basically people partner from a different point of view and

spend a lot of time getting to know each other and just working on it over and over. when i have done different things like that, one of the best pieces of advice i've received and that really works is when you are talking with somebody that you disagree and you feel that outrage boiling up, and i think outrage is the word to describe so much of the mental component of alert station we are feeling these days, you feel it in your chest tightening or wherever you feel it -- you stop and you ask another question. that is the only thing you let yourself do when you are feeling more angry and more argumentative and it is a technique i have found is brilliant. it does also work with couples. it is a really valuable thing. you kind of need the other person to be doing it too. but just by doing it it creates help for them to do it. there is also an example of what not to do. i was hosting a dinner or a meeting with 40 members of

congress, which is an incredible turnout, bipartisan, 20 and 20. this is a unique chance when you are trying to get people to work on something and the topic of this meeting was going to be all the things that you believe and tell yourself that are wrong. so i said, ok, republicans, you tell yourself tax cuts pay for themselves. no, they don't. ok, democrats, you tell yourselves you can print money or you don't need to worry about fixing entitlements. i picked some of the core fiscal myths that many of them hold onto. this was not greeted with warmth and connection. this was not like ok, we are wrong and you are right. it was the most hostile, blown event i have ever run. and obviously was going to be because it was a terrible way to confront anything. there is no wrong or right. that's not true. there is a lot of wrong or right. nobody comes to what they are doing believing they are doing

it for a wrong reason. if it really seems like what they are saying, what they are seeing or believing makes no sense, trying to understand what the story they told themselves to get there really helps. sometimes for my team at work i share the stories of my top 10 worst moments and there are many of them, but this is one of the biggest wasted opportunities, because i thought i would take myspace to explain why someone else's wrong and i don't think that can ever work. >> i sat in on this meeting right before thanksgiving and i kept listening to moderators and i was thinking many thanksgiving tables would benefit from this. lindsay, i think if you did had a moderator at thanksgiving, many family members would think, kick rocks. when people agree to be in the convergent dialogue, it is specific that they know what they are getting into. how do you bring these lessons into your personal life in a way

that people want to receive it? i remember listening to it and thinking there were so many useful things, but it is much harder to do in a casual interpersonal space. i'm curious about what works? [laughter] lindsay: you really dropped a bomb on me. i don't have a silver bullet for you. i think for me, it is as simple as and going back to what we talked about, it is putting your own, it is listening. at bottom line. it is a deeply listening. i think many of us, especially at the thanksgiving table, are looking for our chance to speak. we are waiting for the person to wrap it up so we can make are important white. the bottom line is to look for opportunities to listen.

and to truly hear the person, what they are saying and what is underneath what they are saying? what are the core values underneath what they are saying that you can connect with? that is really the most important thing for all of us. that is what we need to challenge all of us to do is how we deeply listen and ways and this very much connects to my day-to-day work. i work with banks. i encourage, i.e. equip in new ways. they may have had conversations with communities years ago, but if you have that regular, intentional engagement and listening and you don't practice that on a regular basis, there are deep gaps that sometimes develop.

whether it is at the dinner table we've got to listen more. stuart: that is so important, this issue of listening. in addition, whether it be the thanksgiving table or a convergence project, to try to listen and find out what is really behind what that person is saying. again, it is often due to something very important, some values they have, or something that has happened. we are all involved in the budget process project. without mention any names, we had a discussion and a proposal was on the table and one person just kept finding, it was also nitpicking problems. i remember saying, why are you

really against this? and the answer was fairly straightforward. it was, i have spent all my life fighting to ensure that low income people have adequate health care. and what is being proposed here will undermine years of my work. well, without information, we were able to think about how we can address that. i think that is really come very important. that is one of the things that good leaders and facilitators are very skilled at doing. what they are saying is not really the reason and it can be very important to join

inclusions and avoid exclusions. just at the right, strategic time to stop things going south. let's avoid a break when things are moving. to get something done. jessica: we are in an election year. maia, i'm wondering, is there a way that we can encourage productive dialogue? [laughter] either as the media, in our lives, sort of any public way that we can foster productive dialogue as we have these political conversations and they will become increasingly fraught as the year goes on? maya: such a complicated answer from how i see it. because the stakes of this election and the past couple elections have felt higher to most of us than in previous

elections, there is a different dynamic going on. it is a very, very strange thing to be a political independent in this town. you feel completely ideologically homeless and it is a town of two teams. even when people are saying, i want to do something that is bipartisan, a lot of people say, how do you do something that is bipartisan? here is what i want the outcome to be, so i need someone from the other side to sign on. [laughter] and there is nothing wrong with not being bipartisan, you don't have to be, but you can't pretend to be bipartisan by sticking one of the few known republicans or democrats and calling it such. i hope i can do what i'm trying to say justice. this feels like a different moment to me were suddenly a lot of people believe the outcome of this election, not just the presidency, but the majority of the house and/or senate, is so important that it is not just the ends that matter.

you are willing to sacrifice the means of how you get there because the ends matter so much. does that make sense? normally, there are many policies where there is lots of overlap. there are many issues where we can say, the political system is against this or we can focus on the 80% of overlap and that is where we should focus and do those things, but so many people right now feel the outcome for -- of the election matters that they don't want to give the other side a single win. so it is a really hard time to do what we normally need to do, which is focus on the zone of possible agreement instead of disagreement. when i think about it specifically for my issue, because what i look at as a campaign where we have two candidates who are going to promise lots of things they will give us, not a whole ton of ways to pay for them, with the exception of where trump talks -- biden talks about tax

increases -- i guess trump talks about tariffs. and a lot of things about what they won't do. how do you come out with a mandate that avoids the national debt? one of the things for the media is how do you brief the media not to fall into just one sides perspective. so when they are asking questions, they are more pointed toward understanding both, not to go for the headline grabber. if somebody says you are willing to raise the retirement age for younger workers, most people say, we should consider that. there is a lot of zone of agreement. reporters jump in because they know there is a lot of political risk in that one. trying to figure out how the media doesn't play into this tricky situation is one of those things. my concern, there are a ton of

solutions. right now, the unwillingness to do anything reach a huge stumbling block to your question. jessica: i think it is a good time to open it up to the audience if anyone has questions. >> thank you. the panel agrees there is no silver bullet. i would certainly agree. the closest thing to a silver bullet i have discovered recently is a book by one of our great supporters, it just came out, called "possibility." it explains how convergence does work without talking about

convergence. jessica: other questions? >> my question first by way of mathematical explanation, in the information age, the amount of information outside my skull is vastly surpassing and accelerating beyond proportionally what is inside my skull. in convergence terms, that might be called intellectual humility. in this polarized world, do we see any new models emerging where i as a person with an opinion soto diminishes and has a smaller stake and more perspective that the collective of knowledge exists outside and i should count at the table that much less? does that make sense as a mathematical view and what that

might imply for how we conduct ourselves in any of our gesticulations or dogmatism or things like that? stuart: i'm not sure i completely understand the question, but i would say we certainly see these days and increasingly difficulty of trying to understand or identify what is the settled opinion on something. in science in particular, but other areas as well. i think that is just going to get worse. >> the likelihood that any one person is going to be wrong proportionally is getting worse and worse. stuart: i think that is fair. >> that means what i'm really getting dogmatic about something, i should be that much more circumspect. does that create a different psychology? stuart: and also i just think, you just referred to it, we are

becoming more and more frightened by other people's opinions. you see it if you look at the data on what democrats are looking at or trump supporters were non-trump supporters. they are more and more fearful. i will throw this back to you, jessica. i think the press, the media has a very important role in this. one of the things i would suggest is that the new york times use less of the word falsehood. so-and-so falsely said x. it could not be false. and it irritates people. if i'm told that is false, it causes anger. the attempt to try to get the reader to navigate fact in my view serves actually, it does not do that, it tends to upset even more those who would oppose

it. jessica: we have a very high bar for using those types of words. i have seen many disagreements in the newsroom about this. but i will say one thing that gives me hope. i have done a lot of reporting on gen z and their political beliefs and they are actually moving away from extremely aggressively stated political beliefs. the polling reflects this. i've talked to many of them. it is sort of a turnoff to have too aggressive a political belief because i think they are exhausted. they have had so much rancor. most of them came of political age starting in 2016. they were not conscious for political dialogue before then. even though they are marinating in this endless sea of opinion, i do actually have some hope that the result is not just further and further polarization, it is them saying, i don't like any of this.

so that gives me a little bit of hope in all of this. >> i would like to disagree with stuart, but agreeably. [laughter] i think we are living in a world right now again. i think in a world where there are a lot of things that are not true that are said, if you are as certain as one can be, it is helpful when people make claims of fact that aren't. i will address how i heard it. i think there has been much more information outside of our brains then within our brains even before the information age. we are just more aware of it in the information age. that is a truism that has always existed. i think you put your finger on part of why it is so upsetting

as we start to see ourselves as smaller roles in the universe or maybe not the most evolved as technology becomes smarter than us in many ways, that is very threatening. so maybe people try to hold onto their beliefs even stronger. i think thinking about how the shifts in technology are shifting our psychology in a way that seems to be harming our mental health and our ability to get along, and thinking about how we change that could be incredibly productive as we think about ai and big data and things. when it comes to public policy, it gives us an incredible ability to use crowdsourcing in a way that we have and when there are so many parts of policy that people can have opinions on, but there is no way for them to register. referendums is not necessarily the right way to do it, but there is a way to engage more voices and discussions of different issues.

i think there is a lot of promise. lindsay: i do think, the media always gets a bad rap, but there is certainly a role to play in lowering the temperature, but so much of it is driven by going back to the thanksgiving dinner table, it is driven by us. i was really fascinated by some research i saw about why the country and our politics are so polarized. it is because we are polarized. and so the congress being polarized is a reflection of what our communities look like, the articles that are in media are a reflection of what people want to read. it goes back to the conversations that are happening in our household, in our communities. and certainly convergence has a process for us to address some of these intractable policy

issues, but we as human beings have a role to play in that as well. maya: can i disagree again because it is so fun to disagree on panels? i don't think that is true. i think the political environment and i looked at this for a paper i've been trying to write for eight years, so take this for a grain of salt, but i looked at all the theories of polarization and tried to do a polarization for dummies paper. but one of the big things that contributes is the way that primaries are set up. they appealed to the extremes of both parties. people tend to be much more extreme than those in the population. the second thing is that even though we may not feel extreme, we are drawn to extreme headlines. click bait works on the best of us. i tried desperately not to click on click bait, but it calls you and sooner or later.

it will find the thing that will get you there. you can create more of a sense of extremism by understanding that that is how our brains respond and creating ecosystems where we are not hearing the nuance weaves to. i'm not sure it is reflecting this polarized us as much as new forms of technology and our political system are pushing us in that direction. lindsay: i think it is probably a both and to some extent. the sensationalism in media is something that people are drawn to, but there is a reason why we are drawn to it and then it perpetuates those sort of headlines. i don't know that we fully disagree here. i think both of these two things are feeding into each other as creating this self-perpetuating cycle of polarization. stuart: i think we all agreed as jessica's fault. jessica: do we have time for one more?

we have one more. you choose. [laughter] >> i wanted to pick up on your gen z point. where there some young people included in your process? during covid, one thing that did happen was a lot of us were able to zoom in to top people's meetings, the world economic forum, and i thought there was a promise that once we got out of covid, we would find that more common. a lot of the younger generation thought that promise was made. did we learn anything from covid or are we learning anything from what the younger generation want? did that come into your panel? lindsay: two really good questions, i don't know if i know the answer to either of those. i know that there are organizations and one of them

also served. there is a gentleman who goes to college campuses and facilitates a converges process on college campuses. those sort of conversations are happening. i know it was mainly people working in these organizations so we didn't have a younger perspective on that. and then what was your second part of the question. >> did we promised to do more common things when we got back together again? jessica: i wrote a longer piece earlier this year, does the four-year year anniversary of covid start and i think there has been change. actual, marked change. the legislative process as you

know better than anyone is slow. it is very, very slow, but i've been covering these issues for 15 years and i've never seen so much movement and actual progress being made. i mean, there are some people who expect us to be sweden overnight and we are never going to be sweden ever. [laughter] in any context. but i think that discounts a lot of the incremental change that has happened particularly at the state and local level. and even with the setback in d.c. today, there are so many examples of movement forward in paid leave and childcare. specifically on the childcare front, there absolutely has been movement forward for families, but it is slow. we are done. well, thank you so much to brookings and to everyone for coming and to abby for getting everyone together. so, thank you. [applause]

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>> paul this week, we are showing recent supreme crt cases that the high court is expected to rule on by the end of this ter and we will talk to reporters about legal issues involv. it begins each nightt 9:30 eastern on c-span. tonight's oral argument is garland v cargo that looks the legality on the ban ofum stocks. tch the supreme court case tonightnd other recent oral argumes l this week at 9:30 p.m. on c-span. you can also find all of our supreme cour coverage on c-span.org/supremecourt. ♪ >> c-span is your unfiltered view of government.

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