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[PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Hi, I'm Professor Brian Lowry, and this is Leadership for Society, the Daring Dialogues course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. And this quarter, we're tackling the challenge of leading in divisive times. And today, I'm talking to Mark Dunkelman about polarization. Mark is the author of two books, The Vanishing Neighbor: The transformative-- the transformation of American Community, and his latest book, Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back. Mark, welcome to the program. [MARK DUNKELMAN] Thrilled to be here. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Yeah. So let's start from your, I guess, individual vantage point.
You're a self-proclaimed politics nerd. You went to DC after graduating college, and I'm just curious, what have you seen in terms of the evolution of polarization in politics, particularly from your perspective in Washington, when you've been in Washington? [MARK DUNKELMAN] Yeah, I mean, I think that when I got to Washington out of college, I expected there to be More camaraderie between the parties. That there would be sort of a gentle tension between them, and it wasn't gentle at all. And in fact, what I discovered in Washington, specifically, was the degree to which people seemed to get along across party lines, They couldn't really admit to it in public.
All the incentives were to be more vitriolic. And that was sort of, I think, probably my naivete, exiting college and entering the world of politics, that people get along pretty well. But it was also And this is what led to my publishing my first book. It was a reflection, I thought, of something that was happening in the country that we were sending to Washington people who had been given instructions by their voters to be more angry and more determined to resist whatever the other side wanted, as opposed to people wanting their member of Congress to figure out where there was common ground. With people who disagreed with them and find some way to work through the differences.
They wanted their elected representatives to be really entirely resistant to whatever the other side wanted. And members of Congress and their staffs and people in Washington have heard that message from the public and have responded in kind. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Mm-hmm. So you think it's a situation where the public is driving the behavior of the leaders through just our system of politics? [MARK DUNKELMAN] I think that the changes. This was the argument in my first book, The Vanishing Neighbor, is that our failure to really understand the people who live right near us in the places where we work, live.
You know, have coffee has made it so that we are more inclined to demand complete fealty to one ideology or the other from people that we elect to Congress or are looking to elect to Congress in replacement of someone who we disagree with full-heartedly. And so yes, I think that ultimately, for all that we talk about the problems of the filibuster or gerrymandering or money in politics or, you know, the media is balkanized or what have you, social media, you name, ultimately the- The change that has driven our politics to be so vitriolic is one that centers on how we live our everyday lives. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Hmm. And what do you think is the cause of this?
I think you talk about is retreating into kind of homogeneous social circles where there's less people around you who disagree. Like, what do you think is driving that? And is it, do you think it's still happening, the forces that are pushing us in that direction? [MARK DUNKELMAN] Yeah, I certainly think it's probably gotten worse since I wrote that book in 2014. The core driver is that if you look at your social universe like a diagram along the rings of Saturn, with your most intimate contacts, your spouse,
your best friends, your children, your parents in the innermost rings, and people who you know only a little bit, like that share some common interest in some political topic or some football team or whatever, in the outermost rings. The middle rings Are people who you know well enough to ask about something substantive in their lives, but they aren't really close friends. So you would know something better than to say, you know, "Isn't it nice out today?" Or, "I'm worried about the coming storm." You'd be, you know, "I heard your mom fell," or, "I hear your son is struggling in math," or whatever it is. That sort of relationship I call a middle ring relationship.
It's familiar, but not intimate. And the core shift, I think, in American society over the course of the last Century is that we went from having very thick middle rings that people were really connected to, those sorts of people who are familiar but not intimate, to having very thin middle rings and instead investing that social capital, those hours and that attention In the inner, more in the innermost ring. So we are much more closely connected today to the people who you might text with, or I guess probably for younger generations that you would Signal with or WhatsApp with or whatnot. But certainly text-when text was the prevailing SMS phenomenon,
it was generally with, you know, 10, 20 people. Like, the bulk of your texts went to the same people, and they were very close contact. And then we also invest much more time in people who share some common Interest, but we don't know at all. You know, people who are on.political Twitter or they have a very strong hobby.or they are very invested in their football team. And so they don't really know the people who have the. .handles on X or on whatever social media platform they are. But that is sort of.sucking up a lot of our social capital.
.those inner and outermost rings.in ways that were not true in the 1930s, '40s, '50s. And in those little. Oh, go ahead. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] I guess I was wondering, like, why the collapse of the middle ring? Like, what is driving that, do you think? [MARK DUNKELMAN] Well, I mean, there are two things about it. One is, I think the middle rings are remarkable in that it's through the middle rings that you meet people who have a different point of view, right?
Like, you both reach for the last donut at the PTA meeting, and it turns out that the two of you have kids who are in the same fourth grade class. And it turns out that one of you is a Republican, one of you is a Democrat. But like you, you now develop this relationship and you begin to understand that world through the other person's eyes. I don't think that happens in the inner or the outer, both rings, for the most part. Those are, to your point earlier, we are sort of, we're sequestered in, in, um, in bubbles that are exclusively of one mind for the most part.
The collapse of the middle rings, I think, is driven sort of like a crime in that there was motive and opportunity. When my grandfather kissed my grandmother goodbye, going to work in the morning in the 1950s, it was unlikely that they were going to be able to be in touch in any great length through the course of the day. Like, he was at the office, she was at home. Like, they'd see each other at dinner and then they'd catch up, but, like, there was no opportunity My wife and I have been- she left for the office, you know, whatever it was, five hours ago. And I bet you we've had 30 texts since then about where our
older daughter is, where our younger daughter is, you know, what meeting she's going into, who's gonna do pickup tonight. Like, they're all- we're just constantly in touch. Similarly, my best friend just came through Providence, where I am, on his way to a meeting in Romania. And he landed this morning. And we've already been in touch about what it's like in Bucharest right now. And, um. Those sorts of opportunities to be in touch with those inner rings did not exist in the 1950s. Nor, you know, I am a Cincinnati Bengals fan, but I live in Providence, Rhode Island.
Like, it would've been impossible for me to be in touch with other Cincinnati Bengals fans for the most part in, you know, even 25, 30 years ago. Whereas today, it's very easy to be in touch with those people. I don't know really much about them except that they share the same affinity for the same terrible football team. But, but, but. That being said, like, that's also a social media. I'm sorry. That's also a social capital time suck that makes it so that when I see that there is a meeting this afternoon for the PTA, or there's a bowling league that I would have to attend twice a month, or my wife
gets invited to another book club, like there is less time for those sorts of middle-ring relationships. And then, secondly, like--- There's a question in my mind, if my grandfather had the opportunity to text with my grandmother all day, would he have wanted to? I think he would have. But I'd like to believe that he would have wanted to. But it may be that in addition to us now having the opportunity To connect in the inner and outer regions more frequently. We are also more narcissistic in the sense that we want to find people who share our views and share our proclivities. That it is uncomfortable to have an interaction with someone who we discover voted for the other presidential
candidate in the last election, or the last two elections, or the last three elections. And so in the sense that we are trying to make ourselves comfortable and have conversations with people that love us implicitly because they're in our innermost rings. Or share some common interest that has nothing to do with anything that would make us uncomfortable. Um, the middle rings have dissipated because, like, those are hard relationships to maintain, right? There's the moment where that person says something that you think is really offensive or really out of touch, and you sort of have to bite your tongue if you're gonna keep the relationship, or you have to figure out
some way to navigate around that disagreement so that it doesn't ruin the relationship. That's less true in the inner range or the outer range. Um, and so I think there's a motive and opportunity both play a role in our decisions of where to invest our social capital. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Mm. And so this is in large part where you started. It's about, um- People are allowed to make themselves comfortable in the choices they make, and in some ways this is reflected in the choices they make socially, right?
So they like their inner circle people, they have these outer circle connections, and these middle-ring ones are a little-- They require more of you. They're more demanding, and therefore, you just might over time allow them to atrophy, to get small, and they just kinda dissipate And if this is about kind of the way that people behave, I wonder how optimistic you are about this changing. [MARK DUNKELMAN] You know, um, my second book, Why Nothing Works, is about how America has changed sort of since the '60s and '70s.
Um, that progressivism in particular was really about building up big institutions. And then turned, having seen some of the destruction that big institutions had imposed on various communities, urban renewal on largely minority and poor communities and cities. Or I think there was a review in a recent New York Times, book review about how I think it was called The War Within the War was the name of the book. But it was about how- That there was a racial dynamic within the war about who was being drafted and sent to the front lines. That also reflected the same degree to which the establishment itself, for the powerful men who emerged to really control society in the middle of the century, whether it was Robert Moses
running infrastructure through various commissions in New York City or Richard Daley, the mayor of Chicago. In that period, it was impossible to imagine that two generations, three generations on, there would be no power brokers in quite the same way. Like today, there is no Robert Moses figure quite in the same way that there was back in the 1930s, '40s, '50s, and '60s. There is no mayor who looms over a city quite like Richard Daley did. And my view is that it was impossible in that moment to imagine a world where we would be living with largely with rules, with processes, with rights,
that would supersede the prerogative of establishment figures the way they do now. And so, like, it would've been impossible to think, or almost impossible to imagine a world without a Robert Moses type in New York City in 19- 60. Today, it's almost impossible to imagine Robert Moses coming back, right? It's almost like the alacrity with which he was able to build a highway through the South Bronx while everyone's screaming no, and displacing you know, thousands and thousands of people. The environmental consequences and the dynamics, ethnically, racially, class-wise, all those things. What he was able to do in almost no time was a reflection of what we can't do.
You couldn't find a project that everyone supported that could be done so quickly as what Robert Moses was able to do in the 1950s. And so when someone asks me a question like you just did, which is, "Do you have any hope?" For the future, having seen that the middle rings have dissipated over the course of the last 30, 40 years, my response is that I have no real confidence in my own prediction. Just to say, like, It would have been impossible to imagine where we are today in the 1950s. I think it is almost impossible to imagine where we will be in another 50 years with social relations.
Like, it seems like millennials and Gen Zers have different social proclivities than even my generation or your generation. And we don't know how that will evolve. The irony is the baby boomers were wildly. In favor of, you know, sort of coming together. Hippiedom was about breaking down barriers and wrapping each other in love. And it turns out that the baby boomers, like, Over the course of their full lives, they became almost atomistic, right? Like the ties that bound communities together in the ways that you would have heard or imagined hearing at Woodstock, are entirely different from the sort of sense of what we just discussed, which is that people don't
know their neighbors anymore. Like the middle rings have dissipated. Now, maybe that's the baby boomers' kids, maybe that's a cohort effect. I mean, we could try to tease out exactly what's happening. But the core of it is that it seems to me entirely possible That two generations on from the place where we are now, where the middle rings have dissipated, it is that people are desperate to find real community among the people who live with them geographically. And that, you know, generations on from suburban sprawl and more highways and building horizontally turned into, you know, we now have a deficit of housing.
If a lot of that housing becomes vertical, or more of it becomes vertical and people are in closer quarters, maybe the rings. Form again, and people are more inclined to spend more time with their neighbors than they were. I don't know. Mm-hmm. Yeah, but I'm certainly not putting it past the realm of possibility. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] And so I'm going to now connect that to what you were saying, and I think you were doing this a bit already. So we think of that freedom as reducing strictures that also, in some sense, what people thought about it as reducing the
power of other people to control how you lived, right? And that also means that now you have a question about who gets to make decisions at a large level in society. And so that takes us a little bit, I think, to where you're going with your book, like Who Killed Progress? So when you think about that, like, how do you manage this desire for In your analysis, for people to have some control over their own outcomes and the need to, in some sense, I think, centralize decision-making so things can actually move ahead. Like, how do you think about decision-making in your Who Killed Progress idea and how to bring it back?
[MARK DUNKELMAN] So this is something that feels to me is under-analyzed within the academy, but there may be real valuable lessons that different corners of the academic community understand. And so I'm at the sort of very beginning of trying to unlock some of the wisdom that must exist. But the story that I generally begin with in this realm is that, my wife works a few blocks away. I work from home, and on Friday nights when she arrives back at the house, she will sometimes say to me and our daughters, you know, "I'm just too--" Tired to cook tonight, and both of my children will, their eyes will widen because that leaves the possibility
that I might cook, which neither of them wants. And so I will say something like, "Well, why don't we go to dinner?" And like when my daughters were nine and six, we would then engage in this. Conversation that was extremely uncomfortable because my nine-year-old at the time was only eating fried chicken sandwiches exclusively. She didn't even want fried chicken. It needed to be a fried chicken sandwich. And my six-year-old had heard at one point that one of her friends had gone to Dunkin' Donuts for dinner, I think probably to get one of those egg and egg sandwiches or whatever.
But in her mind at six, she thought that her friend was eating donuts for dinner. And you know, my wife works at Brown and hangs out with very highfalutin people. And so she would want something like unseasoned quinoa for 40 bucks at the restaurant in the arts district. And so, like, three very opinionated women and me trying to figure out where to have dinner. Like, how do you figure, what is your system for doing that, right? Like, it could be that everyone gets to choose on a consecutive Friday, or it could be that we vote. Or it could be that everyone gets to throw a suggestion and anyone else can veto it, or it could be just that Catherine and I.
Choose together and the kids never have no real view on it. Businesses, communities, churches, Countries all have to make decisions like this all the time. So the stakes are often much higher than where a family of four goes out to eat. But like this question of what is a fair process for metabolizing different opinions about what the group should do. There are a whole bunch of interesting things. There are a whole bunch of interesting processes we could try to use in these various situations. But I don't know that we have a perfect solution that will satisfy everyone. In most cases, there are trade-offs. So, like, to the very point that you
just made, you know, this question of When there was a problem, which was that there is no rail line between New Jersey and Long Island, and Nassau and Suffolk County currently, I think, have, you know, eight million people between them, and you want to bring goods and food from the mainland of the United States to Long Island, absent a new rail line or a bridge across the Hudson, Harlem, East Rivers, what have you, there is no way to do it except for trucks. Essentially driving across Midtown Manhattan. And so Robert Moses, who was this imperious figure who really controlled infrastructure in lots of New York during the During the middle of the 20th century, decided that the best alternative was to build
a highway across the Bronx. So a truck could take the George Washington Bridge across the Hudson, cross the Bronx in the Southern Bronx, and then cross over the Throgs Neck Bridge onto Long Island. And there were costs and benefits to that plan. You know, the benefit was- There were fewer trucks driving across the nation's most important business district. The costs were enormous. To the degree that we remember Howard Cosell saying during the 1977 World Series, "Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning," that was 20 years on from the construction. The Cross Bronx Expressway, a reflection of the fact that the property loss, the communities lost, the people who were displaced, that sort of sense of urban
decay that was prevalent in the South Bronx was a reflection of the fact that this one man was able to make this choice. Sort of like Catherine getting to choose where we would go for dinner every time, so the, you know, my two daughters and I are eating, you know, fancy expensive vegetarian food every Friday night, which none of us prefer. But we have no recourse. Well- I think most people think that Cross Bronx was a terrible mistake. When they make that, which I probably. I share that view, and it's hard to read The Power Broker by Robert Caro, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, and not come to the same conclusion.
Rarely in those conversations are we thinking about what would have happened had that not been built. Would there have been- Would we have had terrible asthma and choked off Midtown Manhattan with trucks stopped, during the day? Would we have ever built the rail line that Congressman Jerry Nadler spent his whole career advocating for that would have allowed for goods to be brought across New York Harbor under a tunnel that would have gone through Brooklyn and then Queens? But that fundamentally is the question in our, in our public life today, how do we resolve differences when people don't have a single mind? And I don't know, you know, I mean, I think it's interesting to go through business cases.
Like how, you know, when the sales team and the engineering team have vociferously different views of what the company should do to maintain profitability, you know, three and five years out. I think generally the CEO chooses between them or finds some way to bring them to a single point of agreement. Makes a series of decisions. That's what executives are supposed to do. But that's not how government is. And so trying to figure out what the proper titration is between the ability of someone to choose and the ability of ordinary people to have some influence, is a really tricky business.
Different societies handle it differently. Different realms of American society handle it differently. And I think that the public realm of American life today, we're really struggling to figure that out. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Mm-hmm. And so in your book, about this, you say how to bring it back. So, how do we bring it back? The ability to build things and get beyond the gridlock associated with not having elites like Robert Moses just dictate how things will run.
[MARK DUNKELMAN] Well, if you look at it as a spectrum, with Robert Moses being at one end or a very imperious CEO at that same end. And then at the other end, allowing every employee of the company to make decisions whether or not they're in line with the CEO's vision, or allowing every community that might be impacted by the construction of a high-voltage transmission line from one place in one state to another place in another state, have a veto process. These are the extremes, right? The one is an imperious- Dictatorial system. The other is one where, you know, all power is transferred to anyone who says no and they can veto it.
Somewhere in the middle there, there is some sort of process that balances those two. Extremes. So the phrase that I use in the book is, everyone should have a voice, but no one should have a veto. Robert Moses listened to no other voices as he built the Cross Bronx Expressway, thus we have a terrible route. Today, even the best projects, projects for which almost no one has an ideological objection, are thwarted because if any community between LA and San Francisco Doesn't like the impact of the route of a high-speed rail line would have on their little neck of the woods, makes it impossible for you to have a straight shot from one city to the other to make it actually a high-speed rail line.
And so everyone is. The entire project is predicated on the acquiescence of too many people, all of whom therefore have a veto. And somewhere in there is some other way to do this. And broadly, the book makes the case. For looking at the world of public policy through that lens. Like, that's what, why nothing works is an effort, because most people don't, you know, for, in all of our discussions about who's a climate denier and who's not and, uh, what do we think about these rights or those rights, we've sort of lost this perspective of when we have legitimate, uh, legitimate and heartfelt differences about how- How public policy should be resolved, how do we come to some sort of consensus,
or how do we move forward, when there are real trade-offs to be had? And, you know, I think once you hear the spectrum. We can now have honest disagreements about how you come to that balance. But, you know, there's just, in my view, there's too much conversation suggesting that if we just gave everybody, if we just did what the people want, whoever the people are, we would get what everyone wants without- which doesn't recognize that the people are divided themselves. And then, on the other hand, we have people who sort of say, "We just need another Robert Moses type," or, We just need to give a categorical exclusion and not consider all these other Factors, environmental impacts, community impacts.
You know, was this an Indian burial ground or not, right? There's sort of a sense we need to stop even considering these other things. But neither of these extremes are right. Somehow we need to figure out some way where we can have a real conversation, trade off the difference, and then make a decision. Yeah. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] One of the things on this point, you wrote an article saying, what progressives could learn from Trump.
I assume you got quite a bit of feedback on that. Most [MARK DUNKELMAN] people did, yes. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] What's your argument there? Give me a synopsis of your argument. What can progressives learn from Trump? [MARK DUNKELMAN] Well, the feeling around Trump is that, whether you like him or not, whether you agree with his perspective or not, he is doing things. He's making changes. He's changing the dynamics on the ground on immigration. He's going on foreign policy jaunts, irrespective of what Congress does.
He is firing people or eliminating USAID or sequestering funding in ways that are not in line with what. Progressives see as the process, right? In many cases, like you look at what happened recently with the war in Iran, and in the first weeks of that conflict, the progressive response was, in many cases, he didn't ask for congressional approval, which is true. And like, It is, it does appear by, you know, a duck is a duck, and a war is a war, right? Like this certainly looked like the kind of thing that you would want to see that Congress constitutionally has the prerogative to declare or not. But whether or not the guy followed the rules or not, the question in people's minds was, is this going to
be good for America? Or is this just, like, is this the thing we ought to be doing? And- The Democratic talking point, to my point of view, was, you know, did he follow the rules? And if you go through many of the reasons that it seems to me many of the Biden administration's big efforts. Politically didn't pan out. One of them being his effort to spend $7.5 billion, which is a lot of money almost by any standard, on electric vehicle chargers around the country. And that was designed to allay what they call range anxiety, which is the notion that you're gonna drive your electric vehicle from one place to another place, and you're nervous to do it because you're afraid
there won't be a charger in the middle of that route. That whole initiative. Fell apart, not because the people who were in the Biden administration were working hard, not because anybody was against it per se, but because the process of trying to figure out how you're going to use public dollars to build private infrastructure only in the places where it is not economical to build EV chargers, because obviously you don't want to subsidize chargers that would be built otherwise.
The question is, like, for the seldom-used charger in the middle of a plain state where there aren't many EVs, no company wants to do that, so they're trying to interrupt the normal market forces. Figuring out how to get that money out, how to follow the rules about competitive bidding, how to legitimately lease the land from private landowners who are going to host these sites, how to then put pressure on utilities to hook up the (unintelligible). Like, these are all, like, time-intensive, uncertain. Processes. And, you know, there's a certain element of Trump would've just done X.
He would've just said, "We're gonna put one there," and if, you know, you private utility that is, you know, answers exclusively to your investors, if you don't, we're going to pull some permit that allows you to operate, right? Like, he just sort of would use all of his leverage in a way that was, I think, intrinsically offensive to progressives for good reason. But the upshot is that there was a notion that he was going to push the envelope, not say no. And look at the final outcome rather than have any fealty to the process. It's not to say that progressives shouldn't follow the law.
It's not to say that it's not important whether or not the president goes to Congress to authorize a military action. It's not to say that Democrats, when they're next In office, should ignore all laws about how we contract when we are building public infrastructure. But it is to say, in the 1930s, when the federal government decided they were going to wire up the Tennessee Valley, which was the flyover country before there was flyover country, entirely poor, mixed white and black, denuded by years and years of logging. The log industry had, you know, sort of destroyed many of the forests in the area.
You had subsistence farmers living in poverty for whom the private industry did not want to extend wires and poles because they were so poor that it wouldn't be worth it. The federal government created a bureaucracy that did all of that on its own, which is completely different than our attempt to build these EV chargers, you know, the better part of a century later. Like, there was a Tennessee Valley Authority. There was a single lawyer named David Lilienthal who ran the Tennessee Valley Authority, and he could, you know, dam rivers and build power plants and wire up poles and farms and reforest whole countrysides,
without anyone saying boo, sort of like Robert Moses was able to do in New York City. And we celebrated it on the left. Now we would vilify that kind of thing. [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Yeah, I mean, I wonder if this kind of thing, this system requires, like, a philosopher king, right? Someone who you trust, who's deeply engaged, understands the implications of what they're doing, and then is given the power to just see it through, push past people who can't see clearly. So, I wonder about the possibility of that.
But a bigger question I have is that what you're describing is Like, does the ends justify the means, right? So let's say you know you want. It's better for everyone if, or better for a large population if they have power, and it's hard to get them power. So I'm just gonna push past these rules that would make it hard to get these people power so they can have power, and pushing past the rules is a cost that I'm willing to pay for these people to have power. So that's the story I hear. And I wonder if the issue on the other side is in a Diverse society and a diverse nation, if basically the only thing
that holds it together are the means. Like, so to say, that the end justifies the means potentially misses the bigger point that without the rules, it all breaks down. Like, what would you say to that kind of counterargument? [MARK DUNKELMAN] I think that is largely right. I think beyond the law, there is no freedom. And you, that is the fear, the legitimate fear about Trump is that he seems not to care at all. My counter-argument is, we should follow the rules, but the rules need to deliver. And so there, one of the lines frequently cited from The Power Broker about Robert Moses is Caro writing that Moses was the
best bill writer in Albany, that he understood the machinery of government so well that he could insert into a bill something that would give him some fiat of power that would allow him to roll over the opposition in ways that the opposition didn't see coming. And that was so awful. The results of that, I think he would've probably described himself as a philosopher king, doing the public good. But the impact was so singularly awful in some cases that we have now spent decades trying to build up a scaffolding of rules that will make sure that no one is able to do that again. And that scaffolding now is the primary barrier we have to being able to get things done. And so the very people that are now electing populists
like Trump so that they will smash through these legal Cultural barriers that seem to be preventing progress, uh, are inclined not to invest more in the system, not to reform the system, but instead to break it all down. I think that people who want to protect the system, as you insinuated with your question, right? That in the end, the rules are what hold a diverse society together and prevent anarchy. Those rules need to be updated such that the government, which needs to provide some Solution to various tragedies of the common is actually able to deliver. And the moment, in too many cases, you know, California high-speed rail just being one of them,
but, you know, power outages in California, you know, 25 years ago sort of ended the effort to, to, to. or stilted efforts to create competition within the power generation industry. Like the rules need to allow for government to fulfill. And there's too much time spent saying we need to follow the rules and not enough time, I think, on the left among progressives thinking, are the rules as they exist today actually delivering for the people that we need to deliver for? [PROFESSOR BRIAN LOWRY] Mm-hmm. Well, I certainly hope we find that balance where we find the rules that allow us to actually do things that serve the people they're supposed to serve.
So I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. [MARK DUNKELMAN] I was thrilled to be here and thrilled to reach your audience. (silent)
