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Welcome to the Healing Our Politics Podcast!
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Guest:
Michael Drakovic is a social practitioner, creative producer, and democracy advocate on a mission to create a more participatory democracy. He is a dual graduate, MPA/MBA, of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and MIT Sloan School of Management, and is currently a PhD student in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness at the California Institute of Integral Studies researching the relationship between society and spirituality. Michael is not just about degrees and credentials—he is adoer! He is the Founder and Lead Collaborator at Common Light, a consultancy for renewing human agreements, as well as a co-founder of the state legislative resource Democracy Policy Network and co-lead of Los Angeles for Democracy Vouchers and the citizens’ assembly project Public Democracy Los Angeles. Previously, Michael founded the digital studio Ovrture, where he managed creative campaigns at Bono’s antipoverty advocacy group The ONE Campaign, where he worked on the 2010 and 2011 U2 360° North America Tours.
About the Episode:
In this very special episode, I sit down with public servant and Renaissance man, Michael Draskovic. Michael was my very first one-on-one coaching client, so this conversation holds a deep personal significance for me. We talk about how to overcome the fear of "not enoughness" and break through to self-assurance. Michael opens up about his experience as a closeted gay man and the shadows and light that have shaped his life and service. We also explore the dynamics of fame and access, sharing a practical guide to navigating high-profile relationships while staying AUTHENTIC to the projects you are leading. Citing Michael’s first-hand experience, you will feel empowered to explore these avenues in your own initiatives. We also talk about how his daily practices, like meditation, have blossomed new ways of thinking and leading: reducing partisanship, and leading by listening to shape an environment where everyone’s needs are respected and considered. Plus, Michael shares his insights into participatory democracy, and co-governance: providing ways that leaders like you can test these waters in your own communities while growing confidence and support. PACKED with wisdom and ACTIONABLE takeaways, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to foster a democracy founded on common ground and co-governance nurtured by many voices.
Key Topics Discussed:
· [00:02:40] Guest/Episode Introduction
· [00:08:45] The Grey Shoes Story
· [00:11:18] Awareness vs. Embodiment
· [00:12:40] Lacking Self-Assurance and Belonging
· [00:14:50] Spiritual Abuse & the Lasting Trauma
· [00:17:50] The Intrinsic Desire to Cocreate
· [00:19:17] Michael’s Creative and Political Influences
· [00:21:20] Rethinking Policy: Diverse Voices and Recognizing Community Potential
· [00:27:40] Cafes and Porn Stars: A *messy* Introduction to Politics
· [00:30:35] Michael and The ONE Campaign
· [00:32:45] A little Shop Talk about the ONE Campaign Structure
· [00:33:55] Influence and Power Dynamics that come with a Rockstar
· [00:38:50] Making the Most/Avoiding Pitfalls when working with a high-profile Advocate
· [00:40:44] The Resurrection of George Washington! (A Casual Example)
· [00:42:14] The Pope, The Quakers, and Institutional Potential
· [00:44:50] SPONSOR: SkyRun Vacation Rentals
· [00:48:05] We Can’t Open Hearts by Just Thinking About It
· [00:50:25] Leading with Action with Chi Chi Ossé
· [00:53:30] It's Not About George
· [00:56:10] What Lit Michael’s Fire
· [01:00:57] Get Involved to Fight Fatalism, Recognizing it's a Privilege
· [01:03:04] It Will Never Be the Perfect Time to Fix the System
· [01:04:43] Meditation to Reduce Partisanship
· [01:06:00] Seeing In Many Dimensions
· [01:07:35] Owning One’s Flaws
· [01:08:48] The Forest
· [01:10:25] One New Hire Can’t Save All
· [01:13:55] Taking the Practice into the Room
· [01:14:30] “The Softest Voice”
· [01:16:25] From Polarizing to Polarity: What We Can Agree On
· [01:20:52] Reimagining Political Wisdom with Many Diverse Voices
· [01:22:21] Starting Small with Civilian Group Policy Making
· [01:26:44] The Strategy and Goals of Assemblies
· [01:28:40] What’s In the Works?
· [01:30:44] Inner Work and Policy Work
· [01:32:17] Spaces of Exploration and Development
· [01:33:28] Holding an Object in Your Mind
· [01:37:00] Final Question: “What We Lose In Power We Gain in Legitimacy”
· [01:38:00] “The Leader’s Handbook” (https://www.healingourpolitics.com/#newsletter) Newsletter
· [01:39:10] Sponsor: SkyRun Vacation Rentals
· [01:40:05] Sponsor: ELC (https://www.electedleaderscollective.com)
Key References and Resources Mentioned:
· [00:00:00] Common Light
· [00:44:50] SPONSOR: SkyRun Vacation Rentals
· [01:38:00] “The Leader’s Handbook” (https://www.healingourpolitics.com/#newsletter) Newsletter
· [01:39:10] SPONSOR: SkyRun Vacation Rentals
· [01:40:05] Sponsor: ELC (https://www.electedleaderscollective.com)
Where to Find Michael Draskovic:
- michaeldraskovic.com (https://michaeldraskovic.com/)
- Common Light (https://www.commonlight.co/)
- @michael_draskovic (https://www.instagram.com/michael_draskovic/)
- Restoring Relations Newsletter (https://www.restoringrelations.michaeldraskovic.com/)
- Michael on Twitter (https://x.com/mikedraskovic)
Where to Find Host Skippy Mesirow:
- Receive Support at the Elected Leaders Collective ElectedLeadersCollective.com
- Follow on Instagram www.instagam.com/skippymesirow
- Book a free Clarity Call https://calendly.com/skippymesirow/elc-clarity-call to see if coaching is right for you
Episode Sponsor:
Helping You Heal Our Politics
The Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) organization is the leading US-based provider of mental well-being training for public servants, conducted by public servants and the world's best mental health and human optimization professionals. With ELC Training, you will learn to rise above and become the political healer you were meant to be, improving your well-being in the process.
Contact the HOP Team:
Do you have an episode idea?
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Contact our team at jesse@healingourpolitics.com
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Creators and Guests
Host
Skippy Mesirow
Skippy Mesirow is a prominent leader, certified Master Coach, and founder of the Elected Leaders Collective (ELC) and ELC Foundation. ELC leads the US in mental health and well-being training for public servants, recognized in The Apolitical Foundation's Mere Mortals report, and named as one of 26 worldwide political well-being "Trailblazer Organizations." A transformational leader in political innovation and wellness, Skippy serves on Gov. Polis’s Natural Medicine Advisory. Skippy’s work has been featured in numerous podcasts and publications, as well as main-stage speaking engagements for organizations NLC, YEO, CML, MT2030, Bridging Divides, and Fulcrum, highlighting his significant contributions to mental health, community, and policy reform. Alongside his professional achievements, Skippy lives in Aspen, CO. with his partner Jamie where he enjoys running ultra-marathons, road biking, motorcycling, international travel, culinary arts, Burning Man, and lifelong learning.
Producer
Aaron Calafato
Aaron’s stories are currently heard by millions around the globe on his award-winning Podcast 7 Minute Stories and on YouTube. Aaron is a co-host of Glassdoor's new podcast (The Lonely Office) and serves as a podcast consultant for some of the fastest-growing companies in the world.
Editor
Jesse Link
Jesse is a strategy, research and partnership consultant and podcast enthusiast. A 2x founder, former Goldman Sachs Vice President and advisor to 25+ businesses, Jesse brings a unique and diverse background to HoP, helping to elevate the range, depth and perspective of HoP's conversations and strategy.
What is The Civic Courage Lab™ Podcast?
This is your training ground for courage.
To survive and thrive in the gladiator sport of public service, you need all six pillars of empowered leadership — mental, emotional, physical, social, financial, and spiritual health.
The Civic Courage Lab™ Podcast brings the world’s leading experts in human development together for the people doing society’s hardest work — public servants, civic innovators, changemakers, and bridge builders. Each conversation explores how to apply these insights directly to your role, helping you strengthen all six pillars of empowered leadership through real stories, practical tools, and wisdom from high-impact leaders who’ve turned their greatest challenges into personal growth and collective success.
Success in the ultra-endurance sport of impact demands courage, curiosity, integrity, and love. Here, you’ll cultivate them all — in community.
From the creators of The COURAGE METHOD™ — the framework that’s helped councils move from combat to collaboration, nonprofits from floundering to funded, policies from ideas to impact, and activists from unknown to unstoppable.
Welcome to COURAGE.
Conscious leaders put people first, but so do conscious companies. I spent seven years of my life working at Skyrun Aspen, always joking that it was my public service subsidy, and they walk this. During COVID, SkyRun helped short term rentals transition to long term housing so locals had a place to stay and owners could keep their homes. And when the time was right, they helped us shift right back as a community. If you're looking for a vacation rental company that leads with care, then SkyRun is it.
Speaker 1:To experience their commitment to community and care in Colorado, use code HOP15, that's Healing Our Politics 15, for 15% off a stay, whether for yourself or someone in your community. Check the link in the show notes for more. Hello. My name is Skippy, coach, former elected official, and lifetime public servant. Welcome to Healing Our Politics, the show that shows you, the heart centered public servant and political leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror.
Speaker 1:It is my job to sit down or stand up with the best experts in all areas of human development thought leaders, coaches, therapists, authors, scientists, and more to take the best of what they have learned and translate it specifically for the public service experience, providing you actionable, practical, tactical tools that you can test out today in your life and with your teams. I will also talk to leaders across the globe with a self care practice, getting to know them at a deeply human and personal level so that you can learn from their challenges and journey. Warning, this is a postpartisan space. Yes, I have bias. You have a bias.
Speaker 1:We all have a bias. Everybody gets a bias. And I will be stripping out all of the unconscious cues of bias from this space. No politics, partisanship, or policy here Because well-being belongs to all of us, and we will all be better served if every human in leadership, regardless of party, ideology, race, or geography, are happier, healthier, and more connected. This show is about resourcing you, the human doing leadership, and trusting you to make up your own damn mind about what to do with it and what's best for your community.
Speaker 1:So as always, with love, here we go. Welcome to the Healing Our Politics podcast, the show that shows you, the heart centered leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror. And in this episode, I sit down with public servant Michael Draskovic. Michael was actually my first ever coaching client, one to one, back in the day, and is amongst the most impressive polymaths and renaissance men in our political space today. This man, not even 40, has truly done so much.
Speaker 1:A creative producer and democracy advocate, Michael's life goal is to cultivate a more inclusive and participatory democracy. He is a graduate of the Harvard School of Government. And lest you be unimpressed by that, he is also a graduate of MIT and currently enrolled as a PhD student in CIIS, studying the intersection between philosophy, cosmology, and consciousness. Yes, he's got the educational background and chomps, but Michael is also a doer. Michael served as the marketing manager for Bono's ONE campaign seeking to end world poverty.
Speaker 1:He is the founder of Overture, o v r t u r e, producing mission vision content for brands you may know such as Snapchat, Bumble, A and E, MSNBC, and more. Michael is the founder of the Democracy Policy Network, creating deep libraries of open source policy kits to be used by leaders across the country, including you. Go check them out. They are also the creators of the This Is What Democracy Looks Like podcast. Lest you think Michael gets bored, he is also the co founder of LA For Democracy Vouchers, bringing an innovative approach to ensure that every citizen regardless of income in one of our nation's largest cities has a political voice.
Speaker 1:He is the co lead at Public Democracy LA and and and and since we recorded this conversation, Michael has launched a leadership advisory called Common Light, which supports people in developing the capacities for flourishing leadership along the eight elements of his living framework. And you can check that work out. It is remarkable at commonlight.co. C 0 M M 0 N L I G H T Co. Michael is working to use his deep expertise to bridge the worlds that mean the most to him, bringing creativity, policy, and spirituality together to create a new form of effective participatory democracy.
Speaker 1:Simply wow. In this episode, we dig into living with the fear of not enoughness and breaking through to self assuredness. Being a closeted gay man and the shadows and light cast on his life and service. Working with an international superstar, fame and access, a how to guide to get the most out of those relationships. How understanding the difference between thinking, doing, feeling, and knowing will empower your work.
Speaker 1:A starter guide for participatory democracy and how you as a leader can support and practice it in your community, creating better outcomes by empowering others. Finding the soft voice, more on that, deeply interesting. Michael's daily practices, including a meditation practice to reduce partisanship, how it changed his life and how you can apply it in yours. Owning your faults to better accept and work with others, actionable approaches to co governance, and much, much more. So I hope you enjoy this grounding, connected, wisdom filled conversation with my friend, Michael Droszkovic.
Speaker 1:I am so excited to welcome you to the Healing Our Politics podcast, the show that shows you, the heart centered leader, how to heal our politics by starting with the human in the mirror. This is a very special episode for me. Michael was my first, true first, one to one coaching client in this journey all that time ago. It's been so exciting to watch you grow and evolve. And when we left off was playing with and working around the idea on a new project of integrating creativity, policy, and spirituality, and just an amazing human, lifelong leader, public servant.
Speaker 1:I couldn't say more about this human. And you are all in for a treat. And Michael, I'm so excited to have you on the show today.
Speaker 2:Skippy, thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:So the audience is getting This video is so nice and most of you are listening on audio, but this is super funny to me because I know exactly where you are. We did most of coaching sessions from
Speaker 2:this Right here.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And the lighting situation is apparently everything because I remember the first time we had we were going into winter and I started out with like, oh, Michael. And by the end of the session,
Speaker 2:it was the Cheshire cat.
Speaker 1:I could only see your teeth.
Speaker 2:That's right. That's right.
Speaker 1:And now we've got this beautiful scape and you you look so nice. You're clean shaven, which I haven't seen. What's going on with that?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, you know, I started growing out my hair a bit longer and between that and the beard, it was just too much facial hair. So I decided one needs to go, and I'm gonna keep the long hair.
Speaker 1:So this isn't tied to a newly identified spiritual practice in your new PhD program or anything?
Speaker 2:No. No. It was getting a a little hot during the the summer. So yeah.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. That's awesome. So I actually thought it might be fun to start with a story, and it's kind of the story where we started, which is the story of the shoes. Yeah. Would you be willing to kind of share what that was and maybe, maybe share both what happened, but also how current Michael understands that story.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I grew up in Los Angeles. And when I was, I think, in fourth, fifth grade, I was so afraid to wear shoes that had an ounce of color on them besides white or black or gray. And for me, that meant showing an aspect of my personality and I was just not ready to kind of have that come through. And so I would just be buying gray shoes and black shoes and white shoes and just keep it at that. And it kind of became a story that I carried with me that expression was not something that was for me.
Speaker 2:Self expression, whether it's through the arts or my work. And I think that's also linked to, I grew up gay in the closet. There was a dynamic there reinforcing this need to keep myself hidden a little bit. And so that I feel like has been one of the big challenges of my life is to really work through those fears and to live authentically. And it's something I still struggle with to this day, but it's just emerged as I find when I lean into that and when I talk myself into doing things that demonstrate an aspect of myself, I'm always rewarded by it.
Speaker 2:And it's always a very enriching experience, even when it goes poorly or not as planned. So that's been something that's been really wonderful to work through with you really. Then just to, over the past couple months, see it kind of evolve some more.
Speaker 1:I'm curious, I just spent five days at an opening retreat for a new educational program I'm part of at Naropa University, which if you've been listening to this podcast, know is a place that I really used to judge and look down on and then beg to get into. So that's my evolution. But I had this very interesting experience of being deeply aware of my privilege. Not that I'm not aware of it intellectually, but how many things I get to take for granted. In this place where I as like a straight white male, you know, upper middle class, you know, kind of all of the centers of power effectively, through no fault of my own, those were all in the minority in this group.
Speaker 1:And a lot of the work focused on intentionally having uncomfortable conversations to raise awareness and heal some of those wounds. And it really was the first time that I felt like, not in an intellectual, but an embodied way, I understood what things were like for say my aunt who, you know, grew up a lesbian in the sixties when that wasn't acceptable or anything else. And I want to kind of check my homework and not that everyone's experience is the same, but how would you describe for someone who hasn't had any experience of being in those shoes what it's like to grow up as a closeted gay man or just someone who's hiding parts of yourself?
Speaker 2:Well, there's a lot of dimensions to it, and I won't be able to do them all justice. But I think one of the big dimensions that I experienced was a total lack of self assurance and a sense of belonging, like a self source sense of belonging. So, you know, just about everywhere I would look in society at that time when I started to realize that I was different and this was in the 90s, so there wasn't this widespread culture of acceptance yet. You know, it felt like you had a secret that you had to keep and that the disclosure of the secret would fundamentally end your life. I mean, it was very heavy because you would carry that with you.
Speaker 2:You would develop really heightened sense of kind of perception and vigilance and see where I was always on edge to a degree, especially around other men, other boys. And then also if I were in conversations that were veering towards a discussion about romantic interests and whatnot, it was a really anxious conversation for me to be part of. I haven't thought about it in a while, but luckily for me, I and just who I am have a much, you know, I'm able to work through different communities with more ease. You mentioned privilege, being white, being male. All these characteristics helped kind of lessen the experience of being closeted.
Speaker 2:And so I was able to just learn through that that there are difference in degrees to this experience. But one of the common threads is just a feeling of not being able to be one's authentic self. I think that's probably the big one is just not recognizing what's there and that it's okay and that it's totally fine. I mean, probably the biggest challenge too was many of these spiritual religious institutions that I was a part of at that time. I was raised both Roman Catholic and Serbian Orthodox.
Speaker 2:I didn't know much about Serbian Orthodox teachings on homosexuality, but the Catholic teachings were very loud and clear. And I also went to Lutheran grade school. And again, at this time, I know there's been some reforms in American Lutheran churches. Many of them are more accepting now. But at that time too, it was not something we talked about and was stigmatized.
Speaker 2:So when your relationship with a divine entity or power, higher power is severed by others telling that you're not capable of having these relationships, that really does a number on a lot of people. And I think we're only really beginning to explore a lot of that now from what I'm seeing, this kind of spiritual, can call abuse, trauma that's inflicted on those who are gay, lesbian, trans, bisexual, you name it, who just don't fit into those boxes. And so in some ways, it's kind of ironic now, there's all this talk from these religious leaders on wanting to make sure that the LGBTQ community feels included. And part of me is wondering, we're fine. We're living our best lives.
Speaker 2:It's about kind of including you all in the reality that these are real experiences.
Speaker 1:That's interesting because I would think that so correct me if I'm wrong, but ultimately, anytime a power source, be that a dominant culture or an institution or a parent or just a, an adult is sending the message explicitly or implicitly that some natural part of a child is wrong, then that child is going to make it mean something's wrong with me. Because a child you know, not because they're like little little egomaniac sociopaths running around, but, like, they they literally don't have brains that have evolved to the point where everything isn't about them. And so if mom gets divorced, that's my fault. If being gay is wrong, something's wrong with me. And there's not a power source greater if you're a believer than the omnipotent.
Speaker 1:And that must be just crushing, I would think.
Speaker 2:It it gave a lot of that discrimination just an extra very significant weight behind it because it wasn't just a friend or a teacher saying something, but it was this religious institution that goes back to the death of Christ, right? So in that way, it just had an immense effect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So I want to kind of follow this thread a little bit, but I don't want to overlook other important formative experiences and suggest through omission that this was the single driver of Michael growing up. And so are there other elements, other threads of story that stand out as important for you just becoming you in the early days?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I would say before I get to two other things, one thing I just wanna share is I was once asked on a Zoom call when I introduced myself how my identity shaped my democracy work. And I could clearly make that connection between the story I just shared and what I'm doing now in the democracy space. And I do think that there was part of me that was just intrinsically interested in this work. Trauma and all that aside, I think there's part in all of us that wants to collaborate, wants to work with others, wants to co create the world together.
Speaker 2:And so how to handle both of those stories at the same time, I think, is really important. But I want to say that I can't explain this part. It just was inside me growing up. But there was a real desire to work creatively with people. I was raised, both of my parents were and still are television producers, and my grandfathers were involved in politics.
Speaker 2:One was a scholar of communism and another was in the military and ran for office. And so these were influences that very much were present in growing up. And through those influences, I was just encouraged to think creatively about what was going on in the world and to see things from multiple perspectives. And so that was just a formative household dynamic that was going on.
Speaker 1:It strikes me that you have this source material to pull from. Right? So you have real world examples in politics, in creativity, in media. Right? We don't paint with colors we've never seen before.
Speaker 1:So it makes sense that you would draw on those. And this is just me making an assertion, so tell me if this resonates at all. But I think it's quite common that if we have the ability and privilege in choosing our work, We choose to do something we need. Like many people who go into therapy needed inner repair, etcetera. And it strikes me that there's a number of ways you can do politics.
Speaker 1:There's a number of ways you can do organizing or media, but you chose a path that focuses on inclusion, that focuses on belonging. These two things that you didn't feel as a kid. I think about myself growing up a product of divorce and fractured family. And I look back and although it wasn't conscious at the time, taking a similar path of inclusivity and bringing people together, I'm like, oh, I'm like trying to rebuild this family and make it even bigger and less breakable. And does that connect at all with you?
Speaker 2:Totally. I mean, there's definitely a through line there. And I think a lot of my work right now is just based around ensuring that what we're doing has everyone at the table and we're learning as we build. So it's in some ways kind of rethinking policymaking and politics and as the activity itself of kind of becoming more human. So rather than the law getting passed and then we become more human, which of course is part of it, it's how we get the law passed that's just as important, if not more important.
Speaker 2:And so part of my work in Los Angeles is really trying to just experiment with that. You mentioned the work we're doing on citizens assemblies here, which are just about folks from all walks of life getting into a room and talking about issues that face their communities and then coming up with solutions. So it kind of flips the equation a bit to say, we have all the resources we need right now with us. We have this immense potential. It's just we're creating, we've created barriers that prevents that potential from expressing itself.
Speaker 2:And this is a very different way of going about solving or addressing community issues that begins with a problem and starts with a problem. And then that's kind of how we organize. This starts with a recognition of the potential, and then it looks to what are the challenges in the way of that potential, and addressing those challenges addresses the problems in turn.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And it's participatory. And the example that came to mind for me, which is a weird one, but you know me well enough to know that's what we're gonna get, is there's like a there's a community somewhere that's very physically unhealthy. There's high rate of obesity and as a result, all kinds of disease and early mortality, etcetera. And the old approach or the traditional approach, I guess we could call it, is that community says, wow, we really need a gym.
Speaker 1:And then they sit around and they wait for, like, a big brand to come in and build something, and then they join the gym and hopefully they go. And the approach you're talking about is the community says, we need a gym. We're not gonna wait for someone else to do the work for us. We're gonna start building it ourselves brick by brick. And maybe the gym isn't gonna be as fancy or as well thought out, but by the time it opens, we'll all have lost 20 pounds and have formed real relationships along the way because we've built it.
Speaker 1:Totally. And then once we're inside, we can decide what to do with it.
Speaker 2:That is so spot on.
Speaker 1:Love that.
Speaker 2:I was just at a conference last week, and a woman told me about a group she founded in New Jersey. I'm blanking on the name, but basically it came about because of the mental health crisis kind of embedded within the housing crisis we're facing. And they were, you know, just neighbors who are trying to work on this issue felt like they were constantly waiting for the city to respond to these issues or like to build additional capacity. So they taught themselves how to be first responder like in these times of mental crisis. So they were able to understand how do you approach someone that looks like they may be going through a mental health crisis.
Speaker 2:And so in a way, was kind of democratizing this knowledge out of the purely professional sphere. The part that could be democratized, which was being pleasant and asking people questions and just kind of being with them, of course, looking after your own safety. But it was this amazing insight that there's so much we have yet to, as a community, say, Okay, what can we equip ourselves to do right now rather than waiting that would have an immediate impact and would be much more affordable.
Speaker 1:Yes. It brings me back to being in office during COVID, and what is our response going to be? There was a significant push of people who really wanted it to be a community led response. And then there were those who wanted it to be institution led and citizen supported. And yes, we did end up passing funds that went directly to community members and holding them up.
Speaker 1:But ultimately, it was the institution led response that carried the day. And, you know, if I'm putting on my most charitable hat, those in the institutions wanted to do it right. Didn't want to shortcut things. They didn't want to JVT thing. Know, they they had a genuine fear that it could cause harm by allowing individuals to do it.
Speaker 1:But, you know, there were many of us who had a very different view that harm is not just the objective thing, but it's also what's missing in the process. And I think we can look back with objective measures and say, because we've seen the disconnecting continue of communities, and that disconnection being at the root of so many of our individual mental health challenges, that even if the solutions at that moment weren't greater, what could we have gained in terms of our connection to one another and our sense of agency and connection to the process, that long term yields much better results. So I am very attracted to what you're saying. And we're going to come back to project and some of the more theory under that. But I want to come back to the creation of you for a moment.
Speaker 1:I, as I do, took us off on a tangent, but let's come back. And you're talking about a couple other of the kind of key elements of becoming Michael. Could you elaborate a little bit more on those?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I think, I look at another formative experience. It was in high school. Right around the time I was in high school, actually, the City Of Los Angeles created its neighborhood council system. So the City Of LA is about 4,000,000 people, and they divided the city up into 99 neighborhood council kind of jurisdictions.
Speaker 2:And these were kind of advisory bodies that could provide input into city matters, and they were given a budget of, like, 30 to 40 ks at the time. And so the neighborhood council where I lived was met just down the block at the public school here. And so I got involved as a high schooler, and it was intense. I mean, it was hyper local, neighborhood level, local democracy, super messy. You had people that were trying to practice Robert's rules of order and make it really official.
Speaker 2:But then you were also dealing with Jim and Sarah down the street who just wanted a pothole fix and didn't care about all the formality. So I remember one of the big issue that was happening when I was there was like a disagreement between this beloved local coffee shop and artists performing center, like really small, intimate joint and a gay porn star and who owned an editing suite next door. And they just hated each other. And you could read about this. It's like
Speaker 1:Welcome to Lanny's party, people.
Speaker 2:Such an LA battle. They're like, oh, well, you're operating after, you know, 11PM and well, you're doing something that we consider immoral. And so we had this big town hall and hundreds of people showed up all to kind of weigh on this thing. And I just remember being like, wow, it was just the energy. And not just on that issue, of course, but just across it was so high.
Speaker 2:And I really felt like we were trying really hard to make our community better. And so that was my first experience with politics.
Speaker 1:I'm just curious, when you decided to join that local council, do you I mean, that was twenty years ago, but do you remember why? What your thought process was at that time? Because most kids in your school were not doing that.
Speaker 2:Well, yeah, I think part of it was resume padding. There was college applications right around the corner for sure. It was also something new, and I remember that it was very open and they were just looking for help. It was kind of that type of vibe. So I remember just being really fascinated by my history courses in high school.
Speaker 2:And of course, growing up, I mentioned with my grandparents who were very politically active, it just resonated with me. And I felt like, Oh, this could be cool. But I had no that it would really serve as this like formative experience that would kind of anchor me to a hyper local form of deliberative, you know, participatory politics until much later. So it was kind of interesting how that happened.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay, so take us to the Campaign.
Speaker 2:So went to the ONE Campaign, which was an amazing organization working on international development, anti poverty policy. And it was kind of a crash course in how legislation was made, especially at the federal level and at these multilateral international level organizations like Gavi Alliance and the Global Fund, all these groups. And so that was really It was just like, wow, this is how this is how a bill becomes a law. And it was you know, we were very fortunate. Had a little, like, global rock star as our spokesperson.
Speaker 2:So it was easy to get meetings with folks. Right? And because we got those meetings, we were able to see like, okay, this is how if you do have an issue that, you know, and we did have to fight a lot to get people to care about poverty and AIDS and agriculture because it wasn't domestic. In America, have a very like, what's our interest in this? Like egotistical motivation for international affairs.
Speaker 2:And so there was a lot of persuasion and lobbying that had to take place. But it was this amazing process and we would collaborate with different groups and we would go on the hill. But all the while I saw just the immense opportunity to bring more voices into shaping the ideas we fought for. So we had an amazing policy team that spanned parts of Africa, Germany, France, The UK, here in The States. And yet I felt there was still more we could do to bring more voices in to set the agenda, especially those living in Sub Saharan Africa where our policies were directed.
Speaker 2:And they've done a lot of work at kind of expanding the voices at the table since I've been there. But that experience really led me to want to go study democracy and also learn who's doing it, who's actually setting up institutions or governance that really bring people into the decision making process in a meaningful way.
Speaker 1:I'm curious, just from a functional standpoint, was this campaign totally its own entity? Were you collaborating with various organizations? I mean, Africa is a very big place with different organizations that were local on the ground. Were you connected into PEPFAR and some of the national programs? Functionally, how were you coordinating, collaborating, or not with others?
Speaker 2:Right. So it would depend on the issue that we were taking up. So if it were something unlike PEPFAR and the USAID budget, for example, which were domestic programs, we would be working with your typical US based advocacy organizations kind of in coalition. As the policies became more focused on multilateral institutions, like we did one campaign targeted at the African Union, that then became much more about finding the partners on the ground in Africa and different countries to kind of generate that awareness and that support. So it varied depending on who our advocacy target was and then also what the issue was.
Speaker 1:I'm curious what this overall experience taught you about the structure of influence and power dynamics, which is to say, you learn about particular structures that were particularly unfunctional or functional? And then also the dynamic of working with or under the banner of a international superstar. I've noticed in many organizations since, you've not repeated that model. And maybe it's because you asked a lot of them and they said no, but I don't think so. I think it's been an intentional choice.
Speaker 1:You've worked with big brands, but you haven't sought like a huge name. And so I wonder if you could speak to that experience and what you learned because there's gonna be people out there that are thinking about starting a project and are considering all kinds of strategies, including getting a big name, how much they wanna collaborate versus do it their own. So anything that for you was a clear learning that you've carried forward into subsequent projects that you find or have found to date to be a effective learning?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, it was, I think, on the whole, for the cause, a a gift to have someone like Bono at the helm kind of raising awareness about the issue. And this was at a time when very few people in Washington, D. C. Wanted to put their political careers on the line by talking about AIDS in Africa and hunger in Africa, right?
Speaker 2:So from that perspective, I think there's immense value in finding someone with a platform to help kind of get people talking about an issue that no one's talking about. Obviously, a lobbying and advocacy standpoint, it was really helpful because, you know, people knew who we were and we were able to build up kind of relationships with different offices. And we were able to get, I think, most of the meetings that we wanted to get. This didn't mean that people agreed with us or were going to vote our way, but we could at least be in the room with them. So that helps.
Speaker 2:And some of the challenges are not every person with a platform like that is going to have the bandwidth or the interest in taking up issues that need to be taken up. And so I think kind of waiting for that as a strategy or designing your vision around it, requiring that element. I'm not sure how wise that would be, but I know Jamie Drummond, the executive director, I mean, his vision was one of the cofounders of the ONE Campaign. His vision from the get go was like, Bono, you got to be involved. You've got to be involved.
Speaker 2:You got to be involved. And if I remember correctly, he was like, knocked on his door several times until he finally took the answer and took the call and said, Okay, what is this? What's this idea and what's happening? I think there was like a debt relief campaign at first.
Speaker 1:Oh, it's interesting. I didn't realize that it wasn't Bono led. Like I would have made the assumption that Bono wanted to do something in this area and then not having direct experience, found someone who has experience in that area to activate it or strategize. But actually, Bono was approached to be part of it.
Speaker 2:Right. And I just want to be transparent. Like, there's a book that just came out that I think detailed a little bit about this. I think it was in his biography or something he just put out a few years ago. But yeah, he was essentially recruited to do this.
Speaker 2:And he had done, of course, the live aids work and had been seen as like this voice for the voiceless. That had all happened. But I think this was, hey, this was an effort to kind of supercharge that with policy expertise and advocacy know how and see what we could do if we kind of really got smart. So I remember Bono saying in a few speeches something like, we want to become the NRA for the world's poor. Because NRA was kind of the archetype of this well oiled advocacy machine, membership machine.
Speaker 2:And so that, I think, is kind of where a lot of the initial inspiration came from. And I think it's a live question whether that's the model that our world needs right now. Think Bono actually just stepped back from the one campaign, is no longer serving on its board of directors. I think recognizing a new generation kind of coming into the organization and there to be new ideas, new directions and whatnot. So if you're working with one, awesome.
Speaker 2:I mean, you can see it, it's helping so many causes right now to have that person really kind of talking to the media, posting on social and all that. But I obviously wouldn't let you know, not having one stop you from getting going.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So if you were to be back at square one in a project, say it's at the cross section of spirituality and policy, just, you know, for instance, just in case, just pull something random. And you had the opportunity to work with someone who was a significantly known entity in that space. It doesn't really matter who it is. How would you approach that opportunity?
Speaker 1:What are the things that you would do to make the most out of that opportunity? And what are some of the activities or ways of using that opportunity that might be detrimental or harmful?
Speaker 2:I think governance is really important. So how power is shared among different stakeholders, including the people who are going to be largely affected by the policies. So I would start from that standpoint, be like, how are we ensuring that even our mission statement comes from a diverse group of people that look like and reflect the community that we're working in. So I would maybe start there and then getting a sense of who are the people at the table that have the capacity to push in various ways or add various skill sets and kind of having that open conversation about how we're all gonna cooperate with everyone's interests. And you have people from different organizations and their own mission statements.
Speaker 2:And so how to respect all of that. I think it just, you can only work through those issues if you have a system that's set up to allow for that conversation to happen. So a deliberative setting moderated by a kind of outside facilitator, I think is a way to go about kind of sourcing kind of the tensions that exist and then coming to some agreements around them.
Speaker 1:So let's assume that that work is done. We have great clarity about what we want to do, why we want to do it, who it's coming from. And so we know what we want to get out. Let's just make it very specific. Let's just say it's this podcast, right?
Speaker 1:Like, it's about healing our politics. It's super clear. It comes from community. And oh my God, all of a sudden George Washington comes back from the dead. He's a very bipartisan figure.
Speaker 1:Everyone likes George. And George is like, Hey, I'm willing to be the face of this podcast. I'm willing to get out there and help you spread this message because, I said in my speech leaving office that two parties were going to be problematic. And I'd like to posthumously come back and make a case for that. And we're like, oh, great, George.
Speaker 1:That's so awesome. Really happy to hear that. This is an honor. Would you like any modern clothing? No.
Speaker 1:Okay. Can we borrow yours? And then we're like, what do we do with this? How would you use that opportunity or not use that opportunity?
Speaker 2:So the resurrection of Washington for the podcast.
Speaker 1:Just a casual example.
Speaker 2:A casual example. Okay. So I think that you want to get a sense of their comfort level and their interests, why they care about this issue, in this case, why having more than two parties is important. And then kind of build around that. And you're going to figure out what's the stories that we want to tell that kind of amplify that why, that mission.
Speaker 2:How are we going to actually live it? So it's not just content that's living online, but has a real felt process. You know, I was actually thinking because I was raised Catholic, right? And the Pope just had a big sixty minutes interview. I haven't watched it yet, but I've read some of the quotations from it.
Speaker 2:And one of the things he says is that he wants people to open up their hearts to the world and sees all this suffering that's happening in different parts of the world Palestine, Israel, Ukraine, and elsewhere and has been noticing kind of this indifference in people's hearts. And I think he's very correct in what we're seeing. You can also do a lot with the Catholic Church at the institutional level. I'm reminded of the Quakers and how they practice and how they worship. And I'm not sure if you've ever been to a Quaker meeting before.
Speaker 1:I have not.
Speaker 2:So the Quakers are amazing, and the Quakers meet for worship on Sunday, and they just sit in silence, meditation, contemplation for an hour. And then whenever someone feels inspired to speak, they just stand up and share what's on their mind. And so you you go through this experience and, you know, by, like, the thirty five, forty minute mark, someone will have stood up and kind of shared what they're feeling. And so by the end of the hour, you've heard all these voices sharing what's moving within them in this present moment. And it's a beauty you come away just totally connected and feeling that there is a real togetherness and a sense of like, sensing the world together.
Speaker 2:I'm thinking now about what happens in the Catholic church. You know, I was raised Catholic, and there's a point in the Mass where the Gospel is read and then the priest comes to deliver a homily, or basically their reflection on the religious on the Gospel that was just read. So it's one person's reflection. And then the audience sits and just listens. And one of the original meanings of homily, I believe, like homolia is the Greek word, was conversation.
Speaker 2:It was about dialogue. How do we take these opportunities we have where there is reflection happening and expand it to more people? So it's not just the priest's reflection being offered, but everyone in the pews can kind of turn around and talk to one another to really to really hear from one another how we're relating to what was just read. Think there's lots of opportunities like that where we can actually institutionalize what we're saying needs to happen in the world right now. Opening up hearts, I really feel like as an act of feeling together.
Speaker 2:What could that look like wherever we are?
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Speaker 1:It's so interesting. What I'm hearing in that is we actually can't open up hearts by thinking about it. Yes. We actually have to have the experience of opening our hearts to know what that is. And while I don't think you or certainly I are intending to critique the Pope in any way, it's beautiful that he's raising He's using his platform to raise awareness.
Speaker 1:And what I'm hearing you say, correct me if I'm wrong, like the next level from that is not to use the voice to critique others' poor or insufficient behavior of heart opening, but rather to use the institution to provide the framework, structure, and encouragement and safety, frankly, to do it amongst its members, to do it experientially. And that's not to say that the pope isn't doing that. He very well may be. The institutions may be doing that. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Pope Francis, if you'd like to defend your record, just know there's always a seat for you on the other side of this microphone. And, but that's that's effectively what you're saying. Right?
Speaker 2:Totally. I think it gets the first point you made, which is we have to do it rather than just think it. And doing it, I think, is bringing in new ways of relating to each other that we haven't quite seen yet. You know, if we were relating in the ways that I think Pope Francis is asking us to consider, we wouldn't see the same conflicts in the world. And so the fact that we see conflicts in the world is an invitation, in my view, to radically reimagine what are the ways in which we're being together and to work towards and experiment with and try different things wherever you are.
Speaker 2:The Catholic church is just an institution and organization, but we all are affiliated with many. And so what are ways we can bring these dynamics into it?
Speaker 1:So I think that's it's super interesting. And just to kind of close loop, because we arrived at this place with George Washington as our spokesperson. And I'm doing that because I think it will be very interesting to audience members to think about how to better utilize those resources when they're available. And so I'm mixing your stories and interpreting, and you tell me if this is correct. What I'm hearing in that is not using George Washington just to have a pullout quote, not using George Washington just to say like message approved by and funded by, but actually to show him out there doing the work, to have him working on building multipolar forums of discussion, to watch him doing that, to allow others to come into the experience of being with George.
Speaker 1:Is that is that true?
Speaker 2:Totally. Totally. There's a really good example of this. There's a New York City City Council Member named Chi Osei who ran for office, I want to say in 2020, and won. And his campaign was very nontraditional campaign.
Speaker 2:He actually campaigned through kind of community events and mutual aid. So in some ways, what he was campaigning, he was campaigning in the way that he was gonna govern, which was just constant events. It wasn't him going and just delivering speeches or people knocking on doors. He was having, you know, food distribution and clothes distribution. And so he was kind of building the infrastructure for a new world as he campaigned for office, giving people a glimpse that, you know, it was more than just him.
Speaker 2:And it was built There were people kind of taking up responsibilities along the way. So we can see it happening. Of course, the mutual aid that came about during the pandemic is another example of that spontaneous initiative. But, yeah, that's that's what I think I'm talking about.
Speaker 1:I love that example. And I'm not familiar with Chi, so this is not an endorsement of I'm actually making an assumption that it's even he, but his policies or what he's doing in office or anything like that. It's the first I've heard of it, but I have had conversations in the past with folks that basically oriented around, we're spending billions of dollars on campaigns. What if we spent that on delivering the solutions to the campaigns purported to care about? And even if we don't like them, like, let's use that those dollars to support the people.
Speaker 1:And what I'm hearing is Chi, other than, you know, chatting about it, as I have, actually is doing something about it. So shout out to Chi. That's very, very cool. Okay. Alright.
Speaker 1:So the last this is the last question, then I'll leave George's horse alone. But so we've got George out there, and he's now hosting these sessions. He's bringing people together. He's providing the experience and your ex So much of why our hearts are hardened is because of the fun house mirrors that we see in the media, not because of what's actually happening in our lives. Right?
Speaker 1:It's the proverbial, crime is crazy. Oh, no, but it's totally safe in my community. And and that's a reflection of the media landscape, and this is something you know a lot about because at Overture, you're you're creating content and you're getting content out to people, and you recognize the value, from the perspective of content creation. So how would you be capturing George's work in small rooms and getting it out so that a mass audience could see and understand that these good things are happening and allow that to come into their worldview?
Speaker 2:The first thing is it's not about George. Even though George is there, it's about the people that are coming together and the experiences that they're having. It's the transformations that they're going through. It's them saying that this is the most meaningful experience of my life, you know. It is, I think, telling the story along those lines and really building up in the way that it was that documentary on Netflix bringing down the house, the one with AOC in it.
Speaker 2:I mean, all these figures who participated in that documentary weren't household names before that, but that experience totally transformed them. And then, you know, the rest is history. So it's about finding the everyday folks who are who become the heroes. If you're into Lord of the Rings, it's like we got to start seeing ourselves as like simple hobbits rather than like the knights going into battle like Gondor or what have you. It's like this kind of coming to that level in everything.
Speaker 2:And we're seeing it happen. I know we're going to talk about this later, but we're seeing these effects in Europe right now with their Citizens Assembly movement, their deliberative democracy movement, where, again, people from all walks of life are completely transformed and they go on to run for office just because they've had this amazing experience deliberating policy with their neighbors. So it's wild what happens when you can kind of light that fire from within, and it can go really magical places from there.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Okay. Let's go there, but let's take a slight detour along the way. I'd love to start with what are some of the experiments in participatory democracy you're seeing around the world that get you excited. But let's walk there through the garden of the things that lit your fire.
Speaker 1:What were the things that contributed to your sense of clarity around this? Your sense of energy or conviction? And that could be an moment. It could be a program. It could be a slow transformation.
Speaker 1:It could be a relationship. It could be anything. There's no right or wrong answer. But if you were to hand select the, let's say one to three most valuable experiences that lit your fire, to use your words, and then transition into what you're seeing out there that is exciting you.
Speaker 2:Sure. So I'll start with my experience at the Democracy Policy Network co founding that with Pete Davis. We just got to talk to all these policy wonks that weren't part of the traditional think tank structure, but were really interested in how laws could change, people working on public banks or democracy vouchers or restorative justice or youth incarceration. And these were, when I say experts or policy wonks, I don't mean that just in the people writing and studying laws and whatnot, but folks who have lived experience or advocating for these ideas on the ground. We would talk to them, form these policy kits based on our conversations with them.
Speaker 2:And you just learn, like, there's so many amazing ideas and amazing people out there, and their ideas just kind of are stuck in their one locale. And so our job, as we saw, was kind of to help raise up the ideas and spread them and get them out to more people so that they could if you lived in a state next door, you could try democracy vouchers or you could see what could we do around restorative justice and whatnot. So there's this real moment when, one, these people who are doing this amazing work, they wanna help, they wanna help other cities and states introduce these ideas, but they need help doing so. And then on the other side of the equation, the lawmakers too, at the city and local level, and you'd know this, the accessibility to these folks is just much greater than your United States Senator at the federal level. And so you can see them at the grocery store, you can email them, you can set up calls if they have staff, you can meet with them.
Speaker 2:So we just found it was a lot easier to get some of these ideas into people's hands for consideration. And so that just, for me, I think at that point just had my neighborhood council political experience and then this national political experience. And so this was the local and state that I was now learning about, and it just opened up a whole new world of possibilities. And I got to see the ways in which our national political conversation with the media and all of that was and wasn't coming into The States. And so you got to see just like everyone's kind of dealing with both like what's happening nationally, but also what's happening locally.
Speaker 2:And what's happening locally can usually only be understood by like, what's the people there. So that was one big experience. Another one was just being in Los Angeles and starting to work on democracy vouchers here and learning how our city we would face a number of corruption scandals, a few resignations too with this awful racist tape that dropped a year or so ago. And just working an idea in my own community, in my own backyard, and seeing how challenging it can be to talk about something new, talk about reform in a place even like Los Angeles, which is very progressive, still can have kind of a I don't even know how to describe this, really. It's like a nothing can be fixed mentality.
Speaker 2:We rather just complain about it. And so I was like Fatalism. Totally. And I was encountering that in a lot of meetings. Thankfully, found an amazing group of coalitions of different activists who were Reform minded and were really knowledgeable about the history of Los Angeles and everything, so I was able to plug in there.
Speaker 2:But that just taught me, one, that there's like all these people in Los Angeles who want to see things changed, but they don't have a lot of hope that the current systems will allow for that change and that they themselves have really interesting ideas. And so there's no one really serving that. And then I think the last thing was just like, I don't know, a meditation practice, really focusing on exercises to strengthen one's attention and ability to kind of see more of what can exist in a certain situation. That's certainly changed my view of like partisan politics of the past several years and how I think we could go about that differently and just made me more open to seeing viewpoints expressed in people that I traditionally not want anything to do with being able to see kind of what they're saying that I really agree with, that I actually believe is important. And then working from that agreement.
Speaker 2:It's been my experience that people that I've disagreed with in terms of like party politics, when you can actually sit with them and hear what they're saying, and the same happens to you. Like, I found, this is just me, you can get a lot done. You can actually build a bond. It's when we start abstracting who we are and we miss the human element that we become avatars for all the subconscious shadows that we don't want to own up to. So I think this meditative contemplation work was the other big, woah, how do we integrate this work into how we think about politics?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Interesting. I mean, what I'm hearing in that as, like, a broad takeaway is if you are experiencing some form of fatalism or nihilism and you want to not see that be manifest, then what you need to do is get involved. It's the being outside of the arena that's feeding that sense of powerlessness, that's driving daily confirmation biased information that that's true. But as soon as you walk into the arena, in a small way, someone's gonna hand you a shield, someone's gonna hand you a sword.
Speaker 1:You might not be, quote, unquote, good at it. It's irrelevant. You're going to realize that you actually can be in the arena. And from that place, you are almost certainly going to increase your knowledge, experience, relationships. And so the best balm is really to get involved.
Speaker 1:Is that true for you?
Speaker 2:Yeah. I mean, you know, here's the tragic part is not everyone has the resources or the time to get involved, especially in a city like Los Angeles. Our city council meetings, our committee meetings don't even allow, in some cases, for remote input or dialing in, for example. So it's understandable why people are so kind of turned off and why they become fatalistic about it. Yeah.
Speaker 2:Means we gotta be creative. Like, okay, who can? Who can right now, given where we are with our economic, like, issues or social issues, political corruption, who can show up to move the dial a little bit and remove some of those barriers so more people can come and participate.
Speaker 1:Right. And of course, the story is often amongst those who are in the seats that could actually make those changes is that I don't have time. Right? It's like we're already behind in all this stuff. We've got 55 different policy priorities.
Speaker 1:I don't have time to be thinking about how we're taking public feedback. That's not the most important thing right now. And while I can understand how you would arrive at that conclusion, it's actually incorrect because what you really need to do is pause, take a break, and fix the system. Because until you do, every single thing that comes out of that system is gonna be fundamentally flawed, is gonna drive that continued cycle of disassociation that drives distrust, which drives bad policy outcomes, which drives political decline, system decline. And so actually, the thing that you have to do sometimes as a human, if you're exhausted and you have stuff to do for work, at some point you actually have to go to sleep because you can't do the work anymore until you do.
Speaker 1:We get lost in this. And then there's also a dynamic where those who have been in the system the longest benefit in some cases from those power differentials and are not incentivized to make those changes. But it's a devil's bargain because that will only last so long. And on the other side of that, democratic decay is a decay for whatever position of power influence you hold, even in the most benevolent way. And so I just wanna just extra highlight the importance of taking the pause to get down into the systems and process level as a means of healing communities and democracies.
Speaker 1:And with that, you said something super interesting to me, which is that your meditation and contemplative practice for you personally, this has been my experience too, but for you personally has reduced partisanship, has reduced thoughts of othering, has allowed you to be open more open minded and empathetic. And that has led you to being in the room with someone, which has then furthered that. But the truth is being in the room is not enough. We have to watch, you know, one impeachment hearing to know that we can be in a room face to face and continue to not see each other as people. And so I wonder if you could tease apart from us a bit more.
Speaker 1:In what way or how has this meditationcontemplative practice opened your empathetic universe? And then as it's done that, and you've chosen to take that into physical rooms with people, what are the approaches that you have going into those rooms so that you can exercise those expanded abilities?
Speaker 2:The way I describe it is you're able to see more of what already existed. So before and I think and by the way, this is something that I still struggle with. So it's not like I figured anything out or cracked a code. But what I've been able to figure out or see is partisanship is just one dimension of many. And there are these other dimensions, including the recognition that sometimes the politicians you support do things you don't like.
Speaker 2:And so seeing that, we can create a space in which you can have those vulnerable conversations. You can then just disclose more of what exists the table that hasn't been aired yet. You know? And so I think that's that's one thing I've seen. And then, you know, I think that's on the partisan stuff, but just on a on a personal dimension, just a character dimension.
Speaker 2:I mean, once I think it's really hard to really call out someone for their character flaws when you've yourself see like all the things that exist in you and you still do to this day and you're working on and, you know, find embarrassment when they do express themselves, then that becomes this another layer of issues that you have to deal with. And so they're just like, Okay, I'm this way. I see that. I have a choice when or when not to express it. And I'm going to say something when I think it's wrong, but I'm not going to totally throw them out as a human being because they did something that I once did a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1:Does that
Speaker 2:make sense?
Speaker 1:It makes so much sense. It makes so much sense. It's Ash, the part that you said that just really hit me is it helped me be aware of my flaws. Because as you were giving the example of some politician does something we don't like, the thought that was screaming at me is like, Yeah, no shit. I do stuff I don't like.
Speaker 1:Totally. But the predisposition is to give myself grace. I don't have an option that that's okay. Or to extend grace to in group members who do things I don't like, recognizing it's not the totality of them. But the the human predisposition is for out of group members to have a a test of of perfection.
Speaker 1:That if you do one thing that we don't like, well then your entire personhood is And of course that's obscene, but it is hard to see. And yeah, the beauty of being able to own your own imperfections and using that however imperfectly to remind yourself of the humanity and others is, yeah, that really hit home for me.
Speaker 2:I've tried to figure out like a metaphor for it. Like if we're all in the same forest together, like we thrive or die alongside each other, right? And it's not like, oh, my side of the forest is gonna win by destroying your side of the forest. And I think when you can see that, it really, the activity becomes tending to the needs of everyone in the political sphere, not just those that you politically agree with. And in fact, I think sometimes it's the folks we disagree with that may need our attention.
Speaker 2:And so I think it's just coming to that realization. I'm not sure what this looks like in practice. I've not formalized any of this, but I will say I'm seeing seeds of it in the bridging work that's happening around the country where they're bringing people from various parties together to have difficult conversations. Some of that work, think, is really, really good. Some of the work I also think could go further in actually talking about party politics and kind of questioning why that's an important feature of our democracy.
Speaker 2:Because I think you start to see all the ways in which we make agreements, both in politics, but outside of politics and the economy, between people, between communities, as sites for just reappraising how we want to be together. And so when you're able to kind of not just see politics as the center of gravity, but a center of gravity, you can then also look at culture and especially the economy in its own way. And of course, they're all interrelated here. But I think sometimes what happens is we think who we elect is gonna solve all our problems, including those that we see in the economy, or we'll write legislation to fix what we see is happening in the economy. But I think a lot of and that's true policy is going to have an enormous impact on the economy.
Speaker 2:It does already. But so much of what can be fixing the economy, I think it also come about by individual decisions within these firms to pay their employees wages that reflect their living expenses.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, it's just so much more than the individual, right? It's like, it's such I mean, if you stop back for one second and think about it, it's so silly to think that hiring a new person effectively is going to be the only thing you need to do to solve anything. It's like, yeah, we just went out and signed the number one pro skiing athlete, but then their housing is in the summer. Okay.
Speaker 1:Well, that's not gonna be very helpful for our team. Or or we like we just hired the number one race car driver for our f one season. Oh, but our system is a tractor. We only have a tractor. And it's like, okay.
Speaker 1:Well, Verstappen's not gonna win in a tractor. It's like it's such a ridiculous notion that we wouldn't accept in any other area. But for some reason, we continually get duped every election cycle into thinking if we just had the right person. Totally. I wanna elaborate on your forest analogy.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Go for it.
Speaker 1:I'm thinking old growth forest. I'm, like, up in the Northeast somewhere with the huge redwood trees, very high canopy. You can kind of walk through, but there's a lot actually going on. There's these huge trees, but there's also the small mammalian creatures crawling about. There's the insect kingdom.
Speaker 1:There's the avian kingdom. There's the mycelial kingdom. There's the sage and lichen kingdoms. And our politics today is basically like the mycelial kingdom and the Redwood kingdom decided we're not sharing space anymore. This is ridiculous.
Speaker 1:You're taking up all that space down here. We're the big Redwoods. Like, this should be just ours. And mycelials are like, you guys are just lazy. You just stand around doing nothing up there, just gathering moisture as it comes over the hills.
Speaker 1:Like, we are decaying and remaking life. We take and give life. Like, it's ridiculous for you to be there. And so they go to war thinking only one of us shall stand. And when they get to the final conclusion of that, what they find is they're both gonna die because they can't live without each other.
Speaker 1:Right. It is the mycelial network that allows the regrowth of those trees to happen. It's the shade that the trees cast and the weather they keep out that allows the mycelial network to grow and proliferate. And we see this in our farming today. Right?
Speaker 1:When we have artificially moved to monocrop and said, hey, soybeans are the most valuable thing per square foot. We're only gonna have soybeans. What happens? We lose all the nutrients in the soil, and the soybeans can't live anymore. And it takes a decade to regenerate the soil.
Speaker 1:Totally.
Speaker 2:I think that's a beautiful elaboration.
Speaker 1:So you're saying that the mushrooms and the trees have to talk. Yeah. That's what I'm hearing. Mushrooms and trees have
Speaker 2:to We all gotta talk.
Speaker 1:So the mushrooms and trees are gonna talk, but they can't just talk in any way. They can't just yell at each other across the table. They can't continue to see the worst in each other and expect to have anything happen. So for you, taking that meditation practice into the room to steal a Hamilton line. What are you doing?
Speaker 1:How are you approaching conversations to actually be able to hear empathetically?
Speaker 2:Wow. So I'm still working on this, but I try to really understand where they've come from and why they're thinking the way they're thinking. And so sometimes what I do is think about, you you look at someone's rhetoric or someone's speech or someone's actions over a year and to listen for what I'm calling like the the softest voice among everything they say. Like, what's the softest voice that you can hear? And the softest voice usually isn't ever expressed explicitly, but you can hear it within what is expressed, but almost distorted.
Speaker 2:Kind of tuning into the softest voice, the most subtle voice you can you can hear is usually where you can find something that you actually really agree with too and really think is important.
Speaker 1:Can you give an example of that just so I understand specifically what you mean?
Speaker 2:Let's take Los Angeles, right? Their city council leaders have been really slow to move on reform, and they're giving all sorts of excuses why it's actually important that they hold on to power and they, you know, not delegate authority to other bodies. Okay. In that, you can actually hear the really soft voices. I wanna get it right.
Speaker 2:I want us to be a good city. I want us to do this correctly together. Okay. So when you can tune into that, now you can then kind of communicate from that quiet voice in explicit terms. And sometimes you miss, sometimes it's not the quiet voice you thought you heard and maybe a lost cause.
Speaker 2:But I do think at least then they recognize, they see themselves in you because it's the quiet part in them that was motivating what they were saying. They can see it and understand that you're not coming for them. You're not trying to make their life hell. You're actually trying to cooperatively co work with them. This idea of co governance is getting a lot of attention, I think, wonderful because it suggests that governance isn't just the dominion of the people elected, but it's something that is shared and we take up together.
Speaker 2:So I think that's one way to go about it. Another thought I had too was polarization that we see right now where these sides seemingly can't or these positions can't come together, whether it's reproductive rights or gay rights, marriage equality, what have you. And it's kind of finding the quiet voices on both of those sides and turning it from polarization to polarity. So these are now these now need to be together, and they're always going to be in tension. But it's recognizing the tension you can actually develop the new through the middle.
Speaker 2:Right? And so when they're polarized, don't even work. You can't create from it. But when you've now bring them into polarity, now you could be like, okay, well, actually what we're seeing is, you know, this side is really, this is really important to them, and that side, this is really important to them. What can we agree on that would honor both of these views?
Speaker 2:And we see that happening in practice in the Citizens Assembly in Ireland on marriage equality and reproductive rights, where you had folks from a traditionally culturally conservative country, Ireland being very Catholic, have the conservatives feel that their views, their anti abortion views, were respected. And because they were respected, they could legalize abortion. So it was almost like they just wanted to be heard, that they could believe that abortion was something that they didn't believe in, to make it legal. I don't know how to describe this, but it's this like kind of evolution that we're seeing. I think that can only happen though when you have conversations, when you bring people together and they can have those moments of seeing themselves in each other and growing and learning together.
Speaker 2:So
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, what I hear in that is the soft voice is intentionally listening for a why underneath the how that you disagree with that you do agree with. So instead of being angry and demonizing you for policy X, I'm listening for the reason you want policy X is for reason Y. And I actually really agree with reason Y. And if I share with you the recognition of, hey, I see that I believe the reason you're saying this is because you want reason why.
Speaker 1:And you confirm, is that true? And they say, yes. You're like, great. I totally want that too. And I think that there's another way that we could approach it.
Speaker 1:Are you open to having a conversation with maybe more more mutual curiosity of considering other things to get to that shared place? And from that, you're not just opening the door, but you're telling them you're safe, right? That you're not there to hurt them. Allowing their nervous system to settle into a place where they might be able to actually hear you. Because the truth is the person who's sitting at the dais is also scared.
Speaker 1:Totally. It's a scary place to be, to have people that you care about, who are in your community, are your next door neighbors coming at you, telling you how terrible you are, and you're very much on guard. And so to have someone come forward in that way, I imagine would be a really big pattern interrupt. And it would also be a great way for you as a citizen to stand out.
Speaker 2:We're seeing this happen again. I I keep going back to deliberative democracy, but we're seeing what you described go even a few more steps further. So the person who feels like, okay, I'm now in a space where I can share a little bit more and disclose a little bit more of myself, we consider that progress in our political reality. But what we're seeing in other places is that is just like the half step, because then those same people get excited about co creating something together. They get so excited that they're actually growing in new ways and developing new capacities that their entire, like, being is different.
Speaker 2:So this kind of initial disclosure, which we ought to celebrate as a big thing here, is really just seen kind of at the initial step of a much longer spectrum that can happen to anyone. If we create those conditions where everyone feels respected, everyone feels like their viewpoints are going to be heard and seriously considered by everyone in the room, then they kind of turn into, okay, how can I help understand your views? And then you start to see people kind of turn into facilitators. They are trying to really harness the wisdom in the room. This is totally against the political wisdom in our country, right?
Speaker 2:It's about finding the smart people to run the government, to manage the government. And what we're seeing elsewhere is actually when you bring folks with immense diversity of experience into a room and give them a serious problem that they have a stake in solving, and you give them resources, you help provide childcare, cover their transportation, language access, you have experts and information on tap, amazing things can happen. And then they take the ball and run even further than you can ever imagine, right? So that's where I think we can we are seeing some of this go. And a lot of the challenges I'm seeing right now is, you know, public officials have a hard time believing a group of randomly selected people from all walks of life could ever come up with anything interesting.
Speaker 2:And again, all you have to do is just point to these examples where they've come up with amazing actionable policy proposals.
Speaker 1:Right. Okay. So I want you to take this however you want to take it. But if you're speaking, which you are, by the way, directly to a lot of elected officials in this case, or policymakers or staff members who are curious, who are thinking, wow, that that actually does sound interesting. I'd love to test that out, but I'm scared that it might not go well, that I might get my boss might get upset or they might not get it.
Speaker 1:If the result isn't good, then that's my head. What would be some small incremental ways that mitigate risk where they could test out and see if that approach might hold water for them.
Speaker 2:So if, you know, bringing together 100 to 150 people to provide recommendations around policy recommendations for a specific problem is too much, I think a great way to get going is to just try a smaller group of people, take a, a less contentious issue, start with students, start with schools, ask students what the city or county should be doing about x, y, or z issues. Those are all ways to kind of walk before you run, so to speak, to get used to what it means to hold a deliberative assembly selected by lottery. And and then to, I think, gain some confidence because, the best way these assemblies are are are used is to really tackle the issues no one wants to touch because you're creating an environment where it's now safe to discuss these issues. And so long as you're designing for legitimacy at every step of the process, you're gonna protect yourselves from the inevitable tax you'll always get when you try something new. So that means maximizing inclusion, ensuring that the people selected to participate in these assemblies is a representative cross section of the population.
Speaker 2:It also means being transparent at every step of the way so people can follow along the process in public. Committing to hearing the proposals and taking action on them, is another great way to show that you've kind of you're trusting their citizens to make good decisions. The president of the Brussels the Citizens Assembly in Brussels said something along the lines of, what we lose in power, we gain in legitimacy. And that's because she's now participated in a series of these assemblies and has found that when we're these aren't displacing political decision making as we traditionally understand it. It's making the process easier for all parties, and it's also it's helping, like, make a more informed public decision.
Speaker 2:So I would see it less as, you know, a threat or something risky and more of like, hey, we want to get this right. How can we ensure that all the voices that usually show up to complain after we've done something are in the room before we make the decision, figuring out what we should do before we decide. And
Speaker 1:it's hard for me to imagine through my experience that you are likely to find an elected body and a city, county, office, manager, chief of staff, who are all universally aligned and love this idea, that there's gonna be various levels of excitement, fear, etcetera. And I imagine that getting into a process like this, even when the process is successful, but then having the decision makers ultimately throw out the results is a high likelihood probability, in a lot of cases. And so to avoid that, because then that drives the initial distrust that the participants had, it continues to delegitimize, and that's not the goal here. So to avoid or mitigate for that potential outcome, would you and there may be more than these these options, so you tell me. But the the things that immediately come to mind are, a, pick something so uncontroversial or not in the press that no one's gonna care, and they can, like, pretty much guarantee that it's gonna be adopted.
Speaker 1:B, bind themselves through the process to the adoption in the enabling legislation so they can't change their mind at the end. Or c, be willing to move through that internal discord and just kind of roll the dice and see what happens on the other side. And then d, and this is the last one is like taking enough time to get to universal support of this idea amongst the decision makers prior to starting, even if that takes years, which is honestly not unlikely.
Speaker 2:I think there's a few things you could do here. So I should first say that, yes, there have been examples where the 100% of the policy recommendations haven't been taken up. But there's also been a ton of examples. I think the majority of recommendations have been taken up by the governing bodies. And sometimes that's by them themselves, but oftentimes it's through the ballot.
Speaker 2:So they refer the recommendations to the people. So that again is another way in which if someone's not comfortable supporting it, they kind of put it to a vote. But again, I think I wanna highlight the goal with these assemblies is they tend to integrate different viewpoints. And so to give you an example, some of these assemblies will produce a report of say 10 policy recommendations, and the assembly will vote on each policy recommendation. And so as a lawmaker, you'll see, okay, 92% of the assembly voted in favor of this.
Speaker 2:Now the assembly is a representative cross section of your city. So you kind of understand like, okay, that's 92% of the city like support that, 82 support this, 72 support that. And then for under each item, you also have an opportunity to have a dissenting explanation. So the people, the 8% who didn't vote for it the first time, you know, didn't vote for the top one can say, here's our rationale for why we didn't support this. So essentially, you're you're gifting legislators with, you know, political policy intelligence that they can then use to make these decisions.
Speaker 2:And, you know, now you have 100, one hundred and 50 people who are fired up about being more involved. They're also potential political constituency. We've seen a lot of them run for office. So the politicians who have really kind of made this part of their shtick that we wanna continue doing these assemblies seem to have support and interest from the people on that.
Speaker 1:Interesting. Yeah. Love some shtick. We all need shtick. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So tell us a bit about what you have going on right now. Obviously, there's a prodigious amount of work and study and intellect and self development that leads you to the embodied human you are. What are you doing with that at this moment and why?
Speaker 2:So my big goal right now is to help get off the ground this group, Public Democracy Los Angeles, which is working on establishing a civic assembly here in Los Angeles. So, we have an amazing group of, like, 10 or 12 volunteers meeting regularly, planning events, civic proposals to the county. We're trying to get that financed so that we can host the first Civic Assembly in a city like LA. So that's what I'm doing on the political side. And then on this kind of more interpersonal side that I think relates to the inner work that we talked about, I'm still experimenting with different events and workshops that bring people into a more living relationship with elements of politics.
Speaker 2:So I was just in Veruca, Wisconsin A Few Months ago giving a talk and a workshop on reimagining policymaking as a community wide cultural practice. And these were farmers, these were school teachers, these are people that had little to no experience in politics, and in fact, had a lot of negative perceptions of politics and, you know, was able to find a way to kind of bring them into recognizing all those past experiences as legitimate, but then having them step into kind of a new relationship with policymaking where they felt empowered, where they felt that they could go toe to toe with lawmakers and eventually start brainstorming some ideas. So trying to kind of reawaken that lowercase d democratic policymaking spirit that I think is, gonna be really important. And so, yeah, experimenting with with those ideas too, and hoping to do some coaching around that and some workshop planning around that.
Speaker 1:Very cool. And when you say inner work, what does that mean to you? And how does that relate to or intersect with your policy work?
Speaker 2:The inner work that I'm focused on is like a contemplative practice of enhancing one's attention and becoming aware of where we place it and what qualities it has and their effects on us. So just developing awareness of the thoughts we have, developing relationships with them and becoming to know them. I mean, it's a lot of it inspired by the work we did together, coming to understand myself from a whole different vantage point and really deepening that. So for me, it's meditation, it's visualization, it's it's also just letting insights kind of come. So practicing what I would call like a receptivity and really developing a sense of like, oh, this is how my intuition works.
Speaker 2:When I have a new idea, it functions in this way. How can I hone that and come to know that process more? And I think it relates to the political work because, you know, I see all of us as inherently co creators. And so the more we can bring that faculty online and people, the more kind of conscious co creators will have participating in not just the civic space, but all the economic and cultural spaces, doing just incredible work figuring out how we can build new things and that really come from a human centric space.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And you mentioned the coaching container that we were in as a place of exploration or development of those skills. Is that the primary for you? Or are there other places where you found as kind of unlock containers for that type of inner work?
Speaker 2:I think I have a number of sources. That was definitely one of the significant It was like immersed in it, you know, so I was practicing it with you. Also reading various, like, either contemplative or spiritual texts from different traditions has helped just open my sense of different views on the mind and how we think and how to relate to positive and negative thoughts. And then ultimately just experimenting and trying things and seeing what works or how it works and then revisiting it. So really kind of, you know, every day is kind of a drawing board being like, is this working for me?
Speaker 2:Is it helping me become more compassionate towards myself and others? And is it helping me be more fearless? Things like that.
Speaker 1:Are there any, if you were to pick maybe just one, and it doesn't have to be the most important one, but one specific practice that you are at this moment really finding valuable that you could describe very specifically for someone who wanted to try it on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think I would, for like just five minutes every day, take a boring household object and just call your attention to it in your mind and just try to see it in your mind. And that's it. So I like to envision a chopstick, and I just pay attention to the chopstick and just notice it from different angles. It's natural for your thoughts to wander, of course, while you do that. But over time, you'll start to see you can actually hold it for longer than you might realize.
Speaker 2:And I think that's a very important, capacity to bring into the political space.
Speaker 1:Love that. I'm going to give that one a shot this week. I'm going to shift up my daily meditation routine and find something that reminds me of you to focus on. That feels really, really fun. Closing up here, wondering for someone who's listening, who is feeling a bit stuck, kind of doesn't know where to go, who's committed to public service, but is just in that uneasy place of struggle.
Speaker 1:Are there particular areas, practices, retreats, resources, anything that you would just point them to that they could check out as maybe source inspiration?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the work you're doing is really fundamental to this space, to be talking about mental health and politics. So I'd certainly recommend people head over to you. And then if folks want to follow the work I'm doing, they can find me at michaeldraschkovich.com. I have a link to my blog there and then also a link to schedule conversations if you'd like to talk about something. I can always talk to folks about what they're working on.
Speaker 2:If they're interested in some of the, citizen assembly stuff and just kind of getting a primer on that, I would just look at a website called demnex.org. They seem to have done a really good job at summarizing the information that's out there.
Speaker 1:Beautiful. And you've integrated into my next question, but just to elaborate, anything else for people to reach you? Social media? And anything else where people can find you or you'd want to be followed or, anything else?
Speaker 2:Yeah. You can find me on Twitter at, Mike Drashkovich and on Instagram at Michael underscore Drashkovich. And like I said, my website is MichaelDrashkovich.com. Nice. Okay.
Speaker 1:So two closing questions. There's really only one. The first one's just gonna be an inside joke to me because I haven't gotten to do this yet. But if you were a breakfast cereal, what kind of breakfast cereal would you be?
Speaker 2:Oh my gosh. Okay. Easy. Reese's Pieces had a cereal. Do you remember this?
Speaker 2:No. You don't remember that? Was it Reese's Pieces? It was like orange and black. I swore it's like
Speaker 1:Orange and brown. I think I do remember. Like, they were like the puffs?
Speaker 2:Yes. Yeah. Was that Reese's Pieces or is peanut butter Yeah.
Speaker 1:I do remember this. I do. Yeah. No. I think it's Reese's Pieces, but they were puffs.
Speaker 1:Were like little They were puffs. Whatever those cocoa puffs, but they were Yes.
Speaker 2:It was a peanut butter. I love peanut butter.
Speaker 1:That's you. Okay.
Speaker 2:I eat it actually every day. So for me, that would be the cereal I would become.
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. Okay. I love it. Shout out, Tim. That's hilarious.
Speaker 1:Final question. Same question goes out to every guest, which is this. Listeners to our podcast are not passive observers. They are the proverbial humans in the arena. And so if you were to leave them with just one thing, one quote, one practice, one word of inspiration, one anything, but just one thing that would best resource them to personally be a vector for healing our politics, what would it be?
Speaker 2:I would contemplate the quote I shared from the president of the Brussels Citizens Assembly, which is, What we lose in power, we gain in legitimacy.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's really great. Yeah, awesome. Michael, thank you so much. This has been so fun. If for no other reason that I just get to spend two hours with you, that just makes my day.
Speaker 1:It's just a delight to see you and see how you continue to move and grow in this world. And I just can't wait to keep watching your journey, my friend.
Speaker 2:Well, Skippy, thank you for having me. It was a joy to be on, and I'm excited to follow what you're doing and see this community grow. So thank you again.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much for joining us today. If you want to put what you've heard here today into practice, sign up for our newsletter, The Leader's Handbook, where each month you'll receive just one email with a curated selection of the most useful tools and practices discussed on this podcast today and over the course of the last month, delivered in simple how to worksheets, videos, and audio guides, so you and your teams can try and test these out in your own life and see what best serves you. And lastly, if you want to be a vector for healing our politics, if you wanna do your part, take out your phone right now and share this podcast with five colleagues you care about. Send a simple text, drop a line, and leave the ball in their court. Because the truth is the more those around you do their work, the better it will show up in your life, in your community, and in your world.
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