Popping the Filter Bubble
2019-09-23 · Guest: Joan Blades and John Gable (MoveOn.org and AllSides.com) · 52:56
Addressing Political Polarization and Filter Bubbles
Bob Zadek explores the roots of political polarization and the “filter bubble” with guests Joan Blades and John Gable. They discuss how technology and media bias have isolated Americans into echo chambers and present their collaborative solutions: Living Room Conversations for interpersonal connection and AllSides.com for balanced news consumption.
Topics: Political Polarization, Filter Bubbles, Media Bias, Confirmation Bias, Living Room Conversations, AllSides.com, Mismatch.org, Civil Discourse
Speakers: Bob Zadek, Joan Blades, John Gable
The Problem of Polarization [00:33]
Bob Zadek: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Bob Zadek Show, the longest-running live libertarian talk radio show on all of radio—12 years and counting. Thank you so much for listening this end-of-summer Sunday morning.
My regular listeners and friends out there know that I have spent a lot of time and a lot of intellectual energy worrying about and trying to solve the problem of the polarization of America. Many observers have expressed the view that polarization is worse than it has ever been. I don’t know if that’s true or not; I don’t even know how to measure it. I doubt that it is if you look back over the span of American history, but perhaps it is. In any event, whether it’s the worst or second worst or third worst is hardly the issue. It is, nevertheless, bad.
What’s happening is polarization—that is, disagreement on political solutions—is healthy. That’s how we produce a better product, that is, a political product and life in America. But polarization, when it creeps over to the personal—to ad hominem attacks, vindictiveness, and actually splitting up friendships, relationships, perhaps even driving apart family members—then it gets to be not healthy at all. Of course, it is the opposite.
While many people—politicians, pundits, media darlings, and the like—seem to prosper and thrive on the polarization (it is literally the fertilizer in which they can grow their money and their attention and their influence), it is profoundly unhealthy. Nobody has offered very much by way of a solution. That statement, you will learn, is wrong.
This morning’s guests, Joan Blades and John Gable—an odd couple of sorts politically, but that’s beside the point—they have found what I think is the first really sensible solution to the problem of polarization. Now, it may not be the solution ultimately—that’s a bit grandiose—but it certainly is an enormous step in the right direction. And it is a step, it is an approach, that everybody listening to the show, indeed everybody in America who cares, can participate in. They have found a way to turn down the rhetoric, turn down the heat, and actually get people who may have differing or profoundly opposite political beliefs to still, in Rodney King’s words, “all get along.”
So with that introduction, I’m happy to welcome to the show Joan Blades and John Gable. The organization they have formed—there are two concepts they will explain to you: Living Room Conversations (you’re going to love it) and AllSides.com. Joan and John, thank you so much for joining me this morning. Joan, why don’t you start? Tell us a bit of the story—it’s a wonderful story—how you found your way to Living Room Conversation and how it all started.
Joan Blades and the Origins of MoveOn.org [04:24]
Joan Blades: Well, thank you for asking and thank you for having me. I am also a co-founder of MoveOn.org, and I am a resident of Berkeley—was actually born here. I’m a mediator by origin and inclination. Many people have forgotten that MoveOn, when it was started back in ‘98, was midway in the Clinton impeachment scandal. My husband and I put out a one-sentence petition: “Congress must immediately censure the president and move on to pressing issues facing the nation.” We were astounded when we got 100,000 people signing that within a week. In ‘98, that was extraordinary. That’s when I started really learning about politics, honestly.
Bob Zadek: Joan, one question. The 100,000 people, when they were signing on to your one-sentence petition, in your judgment—if this is answerable—were they signing on because they liked the “censure Clinton” piece or the “move on” piece?
Joan Blades: Um, I’d say the answer is both, but particularly “move on.” It was a petition you could sign whether you loved Clinton or you hated Clinton, but fundamentally the feeling was: “Enough of this. We’ve got to get back to doing the important work of having a functional country.” It was polarizing. At that time, I thought polarization was really, really bad. Now I’m seeing—you’re talking about “is this as polarized as America has ever been?” Well, “ever” I don’t know, but in my lifetime, I’d say it is. I find that something we, as citizens, have to address. But for that first petition, we had…
Bob Zadek: Joan, when you say polarization—Joan, one question, I’m sorry—when you say polarization, help the audience understand. Because you and I are both attorneys and we understand mediation, and words matter, as I always remind my clients. When you say polarization, I think you mean more than just people on opposite sides of a question factually. You mean something far more troubling.
Joan Blades: Yes. When I say polarization, I mean getting into the team sport where you just disagree with the other side because they are the other side. I think of magnets: there are the magnets that attract and the magnets that push each other away. We’re at the “pushing each other away” even when you may agree in many ways, but just the way you listen to people because you know they are on the other side and you’re not going to work with them. It’s a very dysfunctional way that we are working with—or failing to work with—each other right now. I’m sure John, you could add to that in many ways.
John Gable and the Netscape Legacy [07:46]
Bob Zadek: So now, John, your background is a tech background, as you have explained in the many interviews you have given. You grew up in very conservative coal country in Kentucky. You found your way to the West Coast. You’re a techie—I say that obviously in the most respectful, just purely factual way—you’re a techie, Silicon Valley, which is where you spent most of your career. You’ve had a political background as well. So tell us a bit about your background to the extent relevant to this morning’s talk, and specifically tell us about AllSides.com, which is incredibly exciting.
John Gable: Well, the whole idea of AllSides actually came from what really started with my work at Netscape. Netscape Navigator—for your younger listeners, that was the first popular web browser. I was the lead product manager for that product. Back then, the internet was young and we were working so hard that literally the CEO locked the doors one weekend to keep us away so we’d actually take a break because we were working so hard.
We actually believed in the really libertarian ideal of incredible connection. You’d have all this information at your fingertips and therefore could make better decisions, be empowered with information, and we’d be connected to people all around the world so we could actually understand them for who they are, for what they deliver. That was the Kool-Aid that really got us up, that I drank, and that got us up in the morning every morning for the people who worked on the product side.
I believed that, and the internet has done that to a great extent. But I also saw a downside to it. Twenty-two years ago, I gave a speech saying how I thought the internet might also train us to discriminate against each other in new ways. That has gotten a lot worse than I ever imagined, and in ways I haven’t imagined, but I do think it’s driven the extreme level of polarization we have today. It’s actually driven by technology, media, and online technology in its current state. It’s changing, and it can change for the better. When you think about polarization, and there are ways to measure it—I can describe those to you—you can actually… if you really want to deal with the problem, you have to understand the cause. I’m very cause-oriented, starting with what caused it, and that’s what led us to AllSides.
The Mechanics of the Filter Bubble [11:02]
Bob Zadek: Now, tell us a bit about the causes because that interests me a great deal. You say you can trace the causes, and you have a particular wealth of knowledge because you have watched technology grow and media along with it. They are clearly contributing forces. So tell us a bit about the causes just so we listeners to your talk can take a step back and really understand the dynamic of what has happened.
John Gable: So there’s one thing that we know from scientific study after scientific study, including a recent one at University of Colorado: that when individuals only see their perspective and only hear what they already believe, and if they are only around people who are just like them, two very fundamental things happen. I become much more extreme in what I believe, and I become much less tolerant of anyone who thinks differently than I do or any ideas that are different than mine.
That’s what we’re seeing worldwide—modern worldwide—whether it’s Brexit in England or the United States or in other parts of the world, that’s what you’re seeing. You can measure that polarization increasing as technology is adopted. We can’t prove a cause and effect, but the correlation is insane. I see that as a major cause because as we get information in an incredibly crowded world of so many voices and so much information, what we use is technology and other ways to kind of filter it out.
At its current state, the filters are just basically clickbait. They’re filtering to give you what you want to see, what you already agree with, or people just like you, whether it’s through sorting in society as we live with people just like us or anything else. By itself, that’s not bad. The problem is that we’re cut off from each other. We’re cut off from people who think differently or are different from us. All the business models and the technology—which I did not anticipate this becoming so brilliant at encouraging us to click a certain way or vote a certain way or spend money a certain way in order to get us to do what they want to do—all that is tied to giving us what we think we want and giving us people just like we are. As a result, we’re less tolerant and we’re much more extreme in what we believe.
Bob Zadek: Now, my listeners out there will know that the political concept that John is describing is called confirmation bias. That is, people feel better when they, having had a certain point of view, hear people who are purportedly smart and well-known and speak with authority—when they hear these public figures saying exactly what this hypothetical person believes, then he gets to feel, “My goodness, I’m pretty smart. All these other people that I respect are confirming what I believe.” So there’s a feel-good—an important feel-good—aspect to this when listeners tune in to their favorite pundits or read their favorite bloggers or columnists. It just reaffirms to the individual that they’re on the right track. So rather than being invited to rethink a position, it gets baked in even more so. Is that a pretty accurate description, John?
John Gable: It’s excellent, and I love the fact that you said “feel good,” because it’s not just about information; it’s also about relationships and feelings. Despite how smart we are and how smart we think we are, as a species, we generally make decisions intuitively and emotionally, and then after that, we rationalize our decisions. There’s lots of stuff you can do if you’re training critical thinking to combat that, but in reality, that’s how we generally do things.
That’s one of the great things where AllSides was just really initially focused on information filter bubbles to free us from being “confidently ignorant,” which is how I always refer to what happens today. You see one point of view and you only see 10% of the argument, and you hear that 800 times, so you’re really confident, but you’re ignorant of the other 90% of the issue. That’s part of what AllSides started to work on. And then Joan Blades with Living Room Conversations, they really focused more on the relationship side. Now we both do that together, and it’s the two together that really start to turn the tables.
Living Room Conversations [16:32]
Bob Zadek: So now we are talking about AllSides—that’s one word, AllSides.com—which we will talk about for a fair amount of time in the show. And we are also talking about Joan and John’s project, Living Room Conversations—I think it’s LivingRoomConversations.org. So Joan, having identified what troubled you the most about the situation as you saw it, and when you describe it, you seem to be describing a social problem rather than a political problem, but of course, you can’t make that clear distinction. So tell us the problem that troubled you so much and this wonderful solution, Living Room Conversations, that you have come up with.
Joan Blades: Living in Berkeley and being a leader of MoveOn, I came to the understanding at a certain point that I was not getting the whole story because I didn’t know why, for instance, a lot of people on the right were not concerned about climate change. Way back in 2004, 2005, I started being able to have some really good conversations, intentional conversations, with people on the right. I made friends and it was very productive. I was able to go to the Hill with a friend from the Christian Coalition to talk about net neutrality. We had the conversations about climate I’d been wanting to have, and it was productive at that time.
By 2008, 2009, it was less possible to have a productive conversation on that topic. I’m a real believer that leadership stands on the foundation of grassroots. So if our leadership is not what we want on very many levels, that’s what we’re responsible for. We have to create the change fundamentally, and that to me, one of the very basic things was to start having relationships again and talking about politics and anything for that matter with people with different political viewpoints, and to do that in an intentional way.
Living Room Conversations is a really lovely container so that those conversations are good. To have that kind of conversation be massively reproducible so that it could go viral—like I experienced multiple times at MoveOn over the course of 10 years—we do not require a facilitator. These are small conversations: two friends with different viewpoints each invite two friends for Living Room Conversations. Those conversations start with a set of agreements about how you’re going to interact, and it’s basically what you learned in kindergarten: take turns, be curious, be respectful, own your part of the conversation.
Then it has three rounds. The first allows you to really get a sense of the deeper values of the people you’re sitting with, so that by the time you get to the second round, which is about the topic you have chosen—and we have a hundred topics, and they’re all reviewed by partners with diverse political perspectives so that it’s as welcoming as it can be across the political spectrum—then those questions are the personal stories about the topic, whatever it is. That ranges from guns and responsibility to free speech to homelessness to technology and relationships. It’s whatever people want to talk about because ultimately, to be able to work on any issue successfully, we need to be able to work together. This has been a wonderful experience for the people doing it, but as things have gotten more polarized, it’s become harder for people to say, “Would you be my co-host?” People are anxious about asking a friend or a colleague or a neighbor to co-host with them. So that leads back to John and I and partnership.
AllSides.com and Media Bias [22:25]
Bob Zadek: I have a couple of observations to start this part of the conversation. Number one, the polarization to me is quite interesting because when we have polls—which are on the evening news every single night on a wide range of topics—there are polls to try to explain what the country believes. I always have the same reaction to those polls. My reaction is: the poll doesn’t really say what people think. It says what people listen to when they decide. Because most people sensibly are not going to spend a couple of months analyzing climate change graphs. They’re not going to do it, nor should they do it; they have a life. Therefore, they use shortcuts—and I say “shortcuts” not in a judgmental sense; anybody would use a shortcut, you only have so much time in the day. The shortcuts are often the bloggers you read and the media you follow. So polls reflect what media people listen to more than what they actually think, because what they think is not a conclusion they intellectually arrived at; it’s a solution they were taught by whoever they chose to listen to. I think this is reinforcing what John said: the media really drives the polls, not what people sat around and thought about; it’s what they listen to. Any thoughts about that, John? Am I onto something? Am I understating or overstating that issue?
John Gable: I love the way you described it. I see it the same way, and it has gotten a lot worse in terms of the filter bubbles, if you will. So people are just seeing one point of view. Pew Research does this thing where they actually do measure polarization by tracking where people stand from left to right through a series of long questions. If you look at that as a graph, it used to look like a big bell curve with most people in the middle and fewer people on extreme sides. About 10 years ago, it began to look like a two-humped camel. Today, it’s not even a two-humped camel; it’s just like a big pit in the middle as people moved more broadly.
What has happened is technology is both the problem and the solution to the problem to what you just described. It’s a problem to the extent right now that people are… unfortunately, they don’t want this. This is not what people ask for. In their surveys, three-quarters of Americans prefer news that doesn’t have a specific slant to it. But what’s available, what’s fed to them—most of this is unintentional, it’s not people intentionally going one way or the other, though that happens a great deal—is that they just see this one extreme point of view.
I always… there’s this old story about how Time Magazine would sometimes write something or they wanted to do a poll or find out what people thought about something, and they didn’t know. There was actually something in a war in South America, I believe—I can’t remember which country—and they didn’t know how many people died and they didn’t have that data. So then they asked people, they asked, they didn’t know, and then they put a placeholder in the article that accidentally got published with a certain number of people dying. Then they called their experts there and they said, “Oh, this is how many people died because I read it in Time Magazine.” It’s like this ridiculous loop.
The only way to get through that, the only way to get past that, is to provide people the ability—the quick ability, the instantaneous ability, particularly in our busy, busy lives—to be able to see different perspectives on the same issue, on the same story. How it can be different even on factual stories on a daily basis is stunning. The headlines themselves—there are examples that we’ve seen where literally the reporters are probably standing within touching distance reporting from the same scene, and the headlines, the way they cover it, what they see from it are so radically different that it’s hard to believe. The only way to get to what’s going on at the end of the day is to show people quickly—this is all we could come up with—is show people the different perspectives. Because we don’t want to have our bias, our perspective, drive things. We want to empower people to kind of understand what’s really going on. And the best way to do that, we know, is to be able to quickly give people different perspectives on what’s going on or on the issue so they can have a broader understanding of what’s going on and then they’re enabled, capable of thinking for themselves, deciding for themselves. That’s what AllSides.com is all about. That’s why we built it the way we did.
Heart v. Mind in Political Discourse [33:20]
Bob Zadek: Joan, you started to talk before the break about Living Room Conversations, where you bring together—it starts as small groups in people’s homes. It starts with two people, probably with somewhat dissimilar political orientation. Each of the two people invite two others to join—total of six people. They sit around and have a conversation about a political issue. You provide them with the tools so they can organize that evening in a way that’s not necessarily contentious and that is designed to build and make relationships stronger rather than have the politics weaken them. All of them are, of course, laudable goals. Now, Joan, on the program of Living Room Conversations, I had one question as I was thinking about that project of yours. Is the goal—is your goal, are the participants’ goal—is it a social goal or a political goal? And let me explain my question because it may not be so apparent. Is your goal that people get along better and to not let political differences spill over, or is the goal to actually—or is a byproduct that people will change their mind on an issue, or is it both?
Joan Blades: Um, I think it’s to expand their viewpoint on an issue. Going into a conversation trying to change someone’s mind tends to not be a good orientation. Once you have a connection with people, it changes your orientation and you start to see broader ways of looking at things. When I started talking about climate with my friend Jacob, it wasn’t a concern for him. It became a concern for him first and foremost because he cares about me. He caused me to understand that, “Oh yeah, I guess my climate change is indeed a progressive end-time story.” I hadn’t thought about it that way, but yes. And I learned about his concern as a faith-based conservative about being marginalized. I don’t want my friend Jacob marginalized. So it’s about gaining connections that deepen our understanding of what the concerns of all the people that we are part of this country with are. Because once we care about each other, then we’re going to try and meet each other’s basic needs and we’re going to be far more able to work on the issues we all care about in a successful way.
Bob Zadek: During a typical conversation, whether it’s the living room the way I misdescribed it or was too narrow, or the broader sense of video conferencing or in a church basement or whatever—when we have those conversations, as I thought about myself as a participant, one of the problems that I had or an obstacle that I saw within myself is: how are those disagreements handled when one in a disagreement, when one of the two disagreeing parties bases their disagreement on facts—now, fact, not opinion, but fact—that are just plain wrong? It’s almost impossible for people to sit around in any civilized conversation and say, “It’s a known fact,” and the other person responds, “No, no, the fact is this.” They’ll never be any… those two sides can never become any closer because they are relying—one is relying upon bad facts. How does the conversation, how do you train people to deal with that?
Joan Blades: If you’re following the conversation guidelines and answering the questions you’re being asked, you’re not going to be citing facts. “Guns and Responsibility”—guns are one of those issues that are very hot politically. What kind of questions do we have in that conversation? We know we’re not going to solve the problem of guns in a conversation and reducing gun violence. But the questions are: “What role have guns played in your life?” or “Where did you learn about guns and what did you learn?” “Are guns’ Second Amendment issues very important to you?” “Is there anything you would change about current gun laws or regulation in your state at the federal level?” That’s the conversation prompt. It’s your personal relationship with that topic, whatever it is. Because once people start getting into citing this fact or that fact, you kind of go back into what I sometimes describe as a political trance, where you’re just having this argument that doesn’t tend to persuade anybody and, strangely enough, tends to get people more embedded in their own point of view rather than expanded.
Bob Zadek: So the goal is on a human level to get people to—I’m going to use a term that’s simplistic, I don’t intend it that way—to just… barriers to just getting along better interpersonally rather than to affect the content of the political conversation. The goal is not to persuade but just…
Joan Blades: The goal is to soften the boundaries, to create some understanding and empathy for other points of view. For example, I had our climate change conversation in Utah, and we had our conversation which was two hours and this one was in a home. Two of the participants, after the Living Room Conversation was over, they had to be kicked out of the house two hours later because they hadn’t had that exposure to someone with a really different viewpoint where they could have a really good conversation. So you have the Living Room Conversation which keeps you in this container of… that’s very much about listening and really getting other people’s views into your sense of awareness. And then after that, you now have a couple of people that you can talk to about other things you’re curious about. It’s to create real curiosity about why people see things so differently. And then yes, you do often figure out that, “Okay, here are the facts I’ve been working with, here are the facts you’ve been working with,” and because you now kind of like each other, you approach it in a very different way.
Bob Zadek: Joan, I’m going to ask you—then I’m going to have some questions for John on AllSides, which is a really very important website for people to be aware of as a resource. But my last question to you, Joan, is: is it your goal that Living Room Conversations actually, collectively on a macro basis, will produce solutions to some of these more vexatious problems, or is it that people simply are more civil, are less angry at each other, take it less personally? Or are both equally the goal, and which of those two goals do you think is more realistic?
Joan Blades: Both are equally the goal, and I think they’re both realistic. It’s had some really good impacts on criminal justice because we found some common ground there, and I think there are other places for that to happen too.
Mismatch.org and the Future [50:08]
Bob Zadek: Now, John, tell us about the rest of the show—the time we have—on AllSides. Tell us about the concept of AllSides, what it is, how our audience can find it, and what you hope to achieve—and I believe will achieve. I love the idea of AllSides as a resource.
John Gable: Well, let me tie together with your conversation. But first of all, it’s easy and free for everyone. It’s at AllSides.com, and we do that without… not behind a paywall or anything like that because we really are a mission-based company. We really are focused on enabling people to understand the world better and understand each other. Our mission is actually to free people from filter bubbles so they can better understand the world and each other.
For homelessness, I think that’s a perfect example that you were just talking about where the heart versus the mind, because we go see the news immediately. What happens when an individual sees news from different perspectives or sees coverage of homelessness from different perspectives is that they become less rigid in one world where otherwise they may just see one perspective and get stuck there, more confident there. It begins to, as Joan said, kind of loosen the barriers. It begins to let us actually understand the broader perspective.
When you can be connected with somebody from the other side and you recognize that your hearts are aligned, that you both want to solve the problem, then you can actually go to use your mind for the best solution. I think that before you do that, some people may make decisions not just on what the problem is using their heart, but actually come up with a solution using their heart or intuition. As we know, sometimes the intuitive answer is not the best answer; it’s not the one that works the best. A friend of mine frequently says, “Go to progressives if you want to know what the problem is; go to conservatives if you want to know how to solve it.” That may not be true, but sometimes it is, and it’s really a combination of heart and mind that’s necessary.
We enable… tell us about the website itself. What does it do? How is it organized? How can our friends out there use it to help their understanding? So we basically report on what’s going on out in the world. We have a way of using some technology we created to identify different perspectives on the latest news that just broke or any issue. You just go there and see today’s news, but instead of seeing our interpretation of the news, you see the biggest story of the day as it was covered on the left—maybe New York Times—or in the center—actually the news page of the Wall Street Journal (we have lots of technology to show they’re actually very center, the news page; the opinion page is a little bit on the right). And then we show a right opinion piece as well, or perspective on the same news.
In one moment, you see the headline, you see a center headline, and you see their headline from across the political spectrum. Frequently those headlines are very different. It’s always almost a joke to look at the way different news organizations cover the monthly jobs report. The headlines are stunningly different, and they all are looking at exactly the same data. The way they spin it in terms of whether that’s a strong thing or a bad thing… I remember reading one article before the 2016 election when I was reading something in the New York Times and it showed how a lot of people were hired and a lot more people got jobs and they had quoted several economists on how that’s about as good as you could do with our economic cycle right now, and it was pretty good. Then I went to Washington Times and their headline was how the unemployment rate just went up, that there actually were fewer people hired now than there were before. And I’d go to Gallup and they actually showed how, well, the numbers they’re using in the government only refer to people who are looking for jobs; if you count the people who have given up looking for jobs who are able-bodied, the unemployment rate was closer to 10%, which was 9.something. It’s like, that’s pretty bad. And all of them had the same data and they all showed things very differently.
What we do at AllSides is enable people to instantly get a broader perspective of what’s really going on. You can go to the site and just see the latest news. You can also go to topics or click on our search area and you’ll see… we have a balancer, so you can put in any topic you like, political topic, and we’ll pull news down from different perspectives so you can see the different perspectives very quickly. What we’re doing more and more is also building into that, if there’s a specific issue you care about like homelessness or criminal justice or immigration, that we’ll actually introduce you to tools like Living Room Conversations so you can have a conversation with somebody else about it.
We launched something with Living Room Conversations called Mismatch—Mismatch.org—which we’re doing in schools, and this brings it all together. What you do is actually have video conversations across divides. We actually tested it in schools where you had rural students in Utah talking with urban city kids in New York City. When we’ve done this kind of thing, we actually measure a shift in attitude that after just one conversation, students better appreciate the other person and the other perspective than what they had before that conversation. After just one conversation, we can measure a shift in attitude toward one another. It does frequently start with that relationship. The kids in Utah couldn’t believe that the New York City kids were using colorful language, because they could get kicked out of school for colorful language. And the kids in New York City were stunned when the Utah kids showed them the video of mountains; they just turned the laptops around and showed them the mountainside that these inner-city kids hadn’t seen. With that, they can begin to appreciate each other and actually consider topics and issues like homelessness or immigration in a different way. They can actually be willing to listen to one another and use tools like AllSides.com to make decisions on how to vote and how to solve our day’s problems. That’s what we’re working toward. We’re really… the way to solve the problem is to empower the people to better understand each other and what’s going on so we can make better decisions and force the politicians to do what we want them to do. That’s how it all comes together.
Bob Zadek: Well, Joan and John, I hope you’re happy, because my whole organization of my life just changed. Now I’m going to cancel breakfast, I’m going to become addicted to AllSides.com, and I’m going to be spending every social minute that I have in some conversation, online or in person, talking about politics. My life is altered now as a result, and you’re going to have in some diagnostic medical manual an addiction to AllSides.com for anybody political. So I hope you guys are happy; you’re going to change the psychological fabric of America. Joan and John, thank you so much for listening. Please, my friends out there, check out LivingRoomConversations.org and check out AllSides.com. It’ll change your life, it’ll put a smile on your face and increase your understanding. Thanks a lot, Joan and John, for all your great work and for sharing your wisdom this morning. Bob Zadek saying so long for now.