SAM: Hello and welcome to Episode 2 to the 7th, that's 128 for binary folks, of Greater Than Code. I'm Sam Livingston-Gray and I'm here with my fantastic co-host, Rein Henrichs.

REIN: It's a nice round number. And I am very excited to introduce our guest, Ben Pollard. Ben runs Local Welcome which is a charity in the UK that makes it fun and easy to cook and eat with refugees in folks' local communities. As they say, in a divided world, making the time to connect with someone different from yourself is a radical act, which I like a lot. Ben, thank you for joining us.

BEN: Thanks for having me.

REIN: And what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

BEN: I'm going to cheat and have two. I'm going to say number one is making Arancini and I acquired it by going to art school which left me time to learn the important things in life like preparing to make Arancini. And if I had to be pushed for I guess a more serious one, not very limiting and more serious than making a good Arancini, but I'm very dyslexic and I have ADHD. I was never really good at reading. I've struggled. But a few years ago, I learned that certain phones allow you to use a kind of accessibility service to talk words to you. And I discovered that I can listen to them at triple speed and kind of remember it. So I've kind of 'read more books' in like the last three years than I did in the previous 30 which has been really life changing actually.

REIN: So I guess the [inaudible] thing to talk about is this charity. The thing that I'm really interested in is how did you decide to do this, both in the sense of what made you want to start a charity and also why this and not other things that you could have done?

BEN: I think beneath it all, there's a couple of stories. One is that when I was two years old, my family moved to Algeria in North Africa. I was born in Liverpool and my parents were old fashioned kind of missionaries of a sort of colonial era and with all of the complications and complexities that that entails. But also, they were kind of pretty heroic and they would help to smuggle families who'd survived crossing the Sahara into safety and people would hide in a church compound. I guess I didn't really learn these things until much later in life. And when I was five, I got asthma and my mom wasn't very well, had eardrum burst and it was not a good day. And then the second war was beginning in North Africa. So that was the independence war and then civil war. And that was kind of thrilling like [inaudible] and we had to leave. So it meant that my family crossed the Mediterranean on a boat. We escaped what was kind of the first sort of modern era of Islamic fundamentalist terror and came back to England. And the NHS kept me breathing and kept my mom hearing. Those things, when you look back, are pretty kind of foundational experiences, I guess. 

Like I said, I went to art school and ended up making films with refugee communities and then trained as an organiser. I had started a campaign in that context asking the UK Government to resettle more than 254 refugees from Syria. And about that time, more than a million people had left from the civil war there. Germany, in particular, was kind of allowing more in, people who were kind of fleeing that conflict. And some friends and I felt that 254 humans was not really enough on our island of however many millions. And then in 2015, I think it was in August, a photograph of a five-year old boy called Alan Kurdi had spread around the world and really kind of put a human face, I guess the human kind of picture to what was previously just a pretty abstract refugee crisis. And that really changed a lot of hearts and minds of people wanting to help refugees but didn't know how and the big political implications. And for me, it had a bit more of a kind of personal resonance. My family left North Africa when I was five and we crossed the same sea and it worked out fine. But this little boy, Alan, went out and he drowned and he was one of hundreds and even thousands. 

I actually left the campaign about six months before that, had been kind of having a sabbatical and kind of helping some Syrian insurgents to try and develop some 3D scanning technology for making prosthetics more accessible in war zones which wasn't really a sabbatical. It was very interesting. Then when this photograph happened, it was very dramatic and it was very sudden. And my friends who were still running the campaign at that point happened to be on a [inaudible], it was like end of August, no one kind of saw it coming. So I just helped some Syrian friends.

One guy [inaudible], he's a dentist from Damascus kind of famous with some press and he just kind of did the rounds, did Sky, BBC, Al Jazeera and a lot of global news. And then came back for dinner at my house and we were chatting with some friends and we just sort of tried to understand for him a lot of work. What is it that he and his friends needed now? They're here, they're safe. They want to start rebuilding their lives. He said, "A lot of my friends they want to learn English or improve our English, so we can start using our skills again so that we can get jobs and move on." Of the many thousands of people who wanted to help refugees but didn't know how, there were maybe some connections that it would be interesting, like would people come and have coffee with a dentist more readily than the sort of abstract sense of meeting a refugee. How could we make it? How can we remove some of the barriers because in that moment, there were a lot of people who had a lot of goodwill but who are often kind of politically understood as the kind of anxious middle as this kind of 41% of people who are kind of tentative. They're not early adopters that kind of go with what the majority feeling is. What that also means is that in new cycles when the media [inaudible] is kind of [inaudible], it's just not built to stay to kind of hold an opinion for very long. Is it sort of addicted to the new angle and what's next. 

So, having run some campaigns, I kind of knew. We've got maybe a maximum of six weeks for this sort of goodwill to last. By the time I did [inaudible], no one knew that there would be attacks in Paris and there was an incident in Cologne. And it was within that kind of timeframe. What we really wanted to do is work how can we make it really easy for lots of people who want to help refugees, to meet them in the flesh. And that's partly in the context where a lot of, particularly UK politics and I think to a certain extent is that kind of Western global phenomenon of people feeling really atomized and distant from power of any kind. One of the things that emerged from that space over the last 10 to 15 years has been things like petition websites and people like Avaaz and 38 Degrees and others who have done an interesting work and tried to fill certain gaps for clicking a petition. A, it doesn't build power and B, it doesn't really give people an experience of kind of public life. So we wanted to try and think, could we use technology to connect lots of people who are different at scale and particularly, can we learn from the story they used to sort of tell early days like, my mom told me not to get in a stranger's car or sleep in a stranger's house and she'd probably say the same when I put her in her Uber on the way to her [inaudible]. I'm like, "What changed?" Why did we suddenly trust technology? That can be a whole other conversation because I think that was a type that kind of commodified trust that isn't the same as kind of solidarity and isn't really in the same as kind of non-transactional human trust. But those are some of the things that we were kind of interested in.

REIN: When you said that you had your early life experiences with refugees, would I be right in guessing that this empathy that you have for these people and their situation was formed through these shared experiences with them in your childhood growing up and throughout your life?

BEN: Yeah. I think the simple answer is yes. It reminds me of another story of probably having kind of grown up with people who weren't from around here. All sorts of different scenarios. College, I met an Iranian guy called [inaudible]. We've kind of had meals and shared friends. And he had been recently granted his refugee status. They didn't have anywhere to live. And sometimes that happens. It kind of had to do with the pure bureaucracy. People fall through the cracks. And so he came to stay with me. He ended up living in my student house with me and some friends for about a year. And in terms of how I'd grown up, that was perfectly normal. But I don't think I realized at that time that it maybe wasn't quite kind of peers and friends. In the end, it took seven years for his wife and two kids to be allowed to come and join him. So it kind of created a lot of empathy, just sort of being with him through some of that time and just watching how hard it is and kind of dehumanizing the impact of bureaucratic systems on family life can be.

SAM: I think there's a lot to that idea of being able to identify with somebody who you've met and at least shared a meal with. Because when a lot of sort of anti-Muslim sentiment comes up in politics and it runs across my Twitter timeline, I immediately think of, I'm ashamed to say that I probably only know one Muslim. But I think of the one Muslim person that I know and it really helps humanize and put a face on the things that people are talking about.

BEN: Yeah, very much. When I was an organizer, I was a little bit of aware of some kind of sociological theories that I've dug a lot deeper into. And there's a thing called Social Contact Theory that came out of, I forget the name of the original kind of grandfather of it, but I think it was about 1954. Research that was happening in the US around segregation and civil rights. The theory goes that if two humans who kind of represent out-groups, so they're very different. Essentially it says if two humans have a shared activity, this kind of equality between them and how they are interacting and also if this activity is in some way kind of endorsed by a hierarchy. [Inaudible], your rabbi. And if then finally there's the potential for kind of continued relationship, then that kind of mixture is significantly likely to reduce our fear and prejudice from each other. But also the groups that we represent to each other. That's very abstract academic stuff. It's really helped to inform some of what we do when we bring people together in kind of one of these sort of inclusive rituals.

REIN: So people who has been on this podcast a lot, if they have a bingo sheet, one of the things that's on it is that I will name drop a philosopher. So I'm very comfortable here in this academic world. One of the things I'm reminded of is this idea called Social Constructionism which is this idea that learning and human development happens through shared conversation and interaction with other people.

BEN: I'm not familiar with that but it certainly resonates. I think there's a lot here about the sort of [inaudible] kind of political biases or the kind of subconscious worldviews. I think people often don't necessarily think of politics or social interaction in a learning context. But obviously, we are constantly learning how to interact with one another and we're constantly kind of absorbing or hopefully sometimes questioning the biases that we have.

SAM: This is a bit of a tangent from that. But my daughter who is now 10 years old has been watching a lot of show called Brain Games on Netflix. And it's a very sort of one on one level pop psychology show. But I'm really glad that she's watching it because she's learning about a lot of these things, like there was an episode that I watched with her recently about conformity and how if we see a bunch of other people doing something, we will override what we are pretty sure is right in order to go along with a group by a margin.

BEN: I mean, it's really interesting and I think that particularly the kind of gamification of I guess positive psychologies or empowering I think particularly young people to understand and I guess sort of own their own brains as a species since we climbed down from the trees or stood upright or whatever our heritage is. Our brains have kind of been living us. I think it's really into it. We kind of had an interesting moment in history. I was starting to understand our brains and this huge potential to start to choose how we want to kind of relate to them.

SAM: There's another interesting thing on that show, a couple of episodes that I've watched, they've had magicians on which seems like a bit of an odd thing but when I stop and think about it, I realized that magicians are people who have learned about specific shortcuts that our brains take and have learned how to exploit them in ways that surprise and delight people and then make them want to give them money. And yeah, I really appreciate this idea of understanding the shortcuts that our brains take so that we can at least be aware of them. What I'm trying to get through to my daughter right now is that just because you know about a cognitive bias doesn't mean it's gone. It just means you now know that it's there and you may be able to spot it when it happens again.

BEN: Yeah, it's really interesting.

SAM: But in this idea of magic, you take that thing and you use that effect to do something else with it that you want to have happen which I think sounds a little bit like what you're maybe trying to go for with psychology.

BEN: Yeah. I think in some ways, we're just starting to kind of scratch the surface on this. So at the moment, we're measuring things in pretty blunt ways of measuring social contact hours, the number of hours that people who are different come together to hopefully interact well. But in the medium term vision is to be helping those in diverse communities who are developing their [inaudible] financial and environmental resilience together. So I guess we're quite interested in looking at ways that we can start to measure quite complex and sometimes intangible always hard to measure things. I guess neuro-diversity is also a really interesting part of that as displayed by me thinking about something else.

REIN: Sam, you were talking about cognitive biases and maybe one thing that's relevant here is this idea that there's an adaptation perspective on cognitive biases that say that cognitive biases are generally heuristics that we apply or ways that we manage errors. And they're not wrong or bad or mal-adaptive per se but they're often applied in the wrong places or in the wrong ways.

SAM: Yeah. I mean, I used the word shortcut but heuristics is another good one. A heuristic is something that is right in most of the time but not always. And so on balance, if you bet this way on average, you will win more. You'll lose some but you'll win more.

REIN: And so in group, bias, for example, has a lot to do with the way that we perceive refugees and other members of out-groups. And it is a thing that we want to try to deal with. But just thinking about it as a bias to be eliminated, not that anyone here was suggesting that, I don't think is the right way. I think we need to think about it as heuristic that's being misapplied.

BEN: When people talk about heuristics, I normally think of Daniel Kahneman and his Thinking, Fast and Slow and obviously the kind of economic implications of heuristics and the fact that we are not [inaudible] that we're messy humans.

REIN: Yeah, it's interesting. There's this idea that all of these biases and cognitive defects going on in our brains mean that we're not thinking right, that our brains are sort of muddled. It turns out that rationality is only one part of what brains do to generate adaptive behavior.

BEN: Yeah. One of the things that I'm interested in in our context is also, and I'm not even sure when or even possibly if we'll get to this, but we're going to be applying for some funding to work with some researchers around social contact theory and I guess on a fairly straightforward level [inaudible]. Is it true that when people who are different, cooking your meals together in a certain way, that it reduces their fear and prejudice with each other, but also then the kind of context that they're working in a lot of the communities that are quite divided. This is a generalization but take lower income white working class communities where people sometimes have fewer opportunities to interact with migrant communities or refugees. And therefore, the predominant kind of narrative is coming often from online and videos. And so the thing I'm interested in is what might it look like to start to tell some of the stories that emerge around our tables online and in kind of video content that tries to kind of use and then amplify these methods of social contact theory. Because to some extent, I don't think necessarily as intentionally but sometimes when you see the kind of content that does increase people's fear and prejudice, that it's sometimes quite smart, [inaudible] been reading his social contact theory in reverse engineering.

REIN: That's an interesting thought. You mentioned Alinsky earlier. And for those who don't know, Alinsky wrote a book called Rules for Radicals. And it was a very controversial book. One of the interesting things that happened is that people on the right very explicitly said these are tactics that we can apply to our goals.

BEN: The funny thing is that Machiavelli wrote The Prince as a practical primer for the powerful to retain power and kind of consciously Alinsky wrote Rules for Radicals as a practical primer for the powerless to build a different kind of power. And yeah, I think that's a really interesting development over the last decade. The smart people on the right understanding those methods and pretty ruthlessly deploying the thought. 

REIN: I have to very intentionally rame in my desire to take things in a very socialist direction. So, I'm gonna do that now by asking you, thinking back about your experience with the people that you're now helping and about this community organization, building communities together, getting people into contact with each other, what is the role of empathy in all of this for you?

BEN: Empathy is important. But I think we are probably more interested in compassion. And also, I think there are even more interesting nuances to this sort of political and theoretical underpinnings that are not just about the old left and right of socialists or other which is not the question you ask but I think --

REIN: Could you explain the difference between empathy and compassion?

BEN: Sure. This is only my understanding in very layman's terms.

REIN: I'm interested in what you mean and how you're using those words.

BEN: Yeah. We've been in touch with a guy called Professor Paul Gilbert who leads a thing called the Compassionate Mind Foundation. He's in Derby where we've been working for a couple of years now. And we're going to do a bit more work with him in the coming year if we can get some more funding more proactively. Compassion-based psychology in the US [inaudible] Kristin Neff who will say, and she has some more accessible and really excellent books around compassion particularly as a more robust measure of well-being and kind of psychological resilience. So, there was a kind of period where, particularly in education, there was a lot of emphasis on self-esteem as a measure of kind of psychological well-being. Again, oversimplifying. There's a risk that self-esteem can look a little bit like narcissism even where it is a good trait, it doesn't necessarily indicate the level of the same resilience that compassion and self-compassion and compassion-based psychologies do.

One of the things that Paul Gilbert is kind of known for is particularly around PTSD, kind of shame and trauma recovery processes. So I was partly interested in compassion (A) in my own experience of ADHD. There's a lot of kind of interesting ways that coaching and developing that kind of practice of self-compassion can be really helpful for kind of untying some maladaptive knots if you like. So it's had impacts in my own life. There's also been in my kind of wider families and experiences of PTSD that have been pretty tricky. And I think whereas there's a sense in which empathy -- it probably is unhelpful to have a kind of hierarchy between them but it's just a slightly different trait to compassion. So for those kinds of reasons that probably not only had to do with my own experience but also had to do with the fact that many people who are fleeing war and conflict have these experiences of let's say PTSD or other traumas where a compassion-based approach has kind of been demonstrated to be really effective. So, empathy, good; compassion, not that good but really helpful in the context that I've experienced.

REIN: It seems like an individualistic approach to psychology or ethics or community is problematic in a lot of ways and what we need is a socialistic approach. Maybe there's another word for that, that I'm thinking of.

BEN: I've read a couple of things in the last few weeks. I've read Uninhabitable Earth and I'm in the process of reading Doughnut Economics by the amazing Kate Raworth who's at both Oxford and Cambridge. And it's very grown up. If we talk about the kind of things that our planet and human species perhaps need right now, I think there's a kind of complex interconnected set of things that do just seem pretty stark and pretty urgent in terms of what the planetary boundaries are and what it looks like for humans to thrive together. And I think it's fair to say that we're not doing a great job right now for that a lot of the signs seem to be pointing towards those getting worse and that we're pretty intentional about doing things differently. And that Bernard Crick said that politics is the negotiation of difference without violence. Personally, I think this interesting relationships between the macro, the big picture kind of political and economic realities we face and back to these kind of small things about how are we learning and teaching kids to be human together.

I guess where for me I think it's more than a traditional socialist approach is that I think the idea of the nation's state is just a very different thing than it was 100 or 200 years ago. And I think perhaps the biggest crisis that has been happening in powerful western world in my lifetime is as much about civil society. When we think of the perhaps social progress that has happened since the Industrial Revolution that's often come from the kind of civil institutions, maybe of kind of faith and labor and education. But I've realized I'm doing lots of name dropping as well and that you've lulled me into a sense of security and safety here.

REIN: Excellent. That is our goal.

SAM: You're in good company. 

BEN: Thank you. I think it's Michael Sandel who talks about the shift from consumer economies to consumer societies. It's something like that. But it just feels like there's that shift that's happened suddenly in my lifetime of identities being as consumers and not citizens. And it seems that that just translates pretty straightforwardly into some of the mess that we're in in terms of how atomized and how kind of addicted to consumption we are.

You guys may remember. I think it was Freud's nephew who kind of invented marketing essentially. He'd read his uncle's manuscripts or whatever and thought, "I know. This stuff could sell things." 

BEN: Chomsky talks a lot about Bernays in discussing sort of how what was originally propaganda directed against other nation states was directed inward to turn people into consumers effectively. The companies that want to sell stuff realize, "Hey, this propaganda thing is pretty good."

BEN: So when we were initially kind of -- this guy Eyad came back for dinner and said, "My friends want to practice English and get jobs." And then another friend called Tristan who works for a very well-known company, I should probably ask him before I just name drop him. He returned for dinner and he had a brilliant idea saying, "You should do this [inaudible] surprising." And I managed to get Starbucks to give us free coffee in 12 cafes across the UK, 12 different cities. He had organized a bunch of his friends and then we emailed about 20000 people saying he wants to have coffee with some refugees. It was kind of [inaudible] outside of people's normal experience of the turf [inaudible] that we then kind of iterated from share a coffee to finding these kind of shared activities. And along the path, I read The New York Times article 36 Questions to Fall in Love and he goes, "We're familiar with that." I think it was even before 2015. And I'd been training as a coach at the time. I was just aware of what was just starting to become aware of how powerful questions can be. And it was in that context that we started to play around with what would happen if people rather than sharing coffee or even just sharing food, that if they did some cooking together. So now, IKEA sends a little box of simple cooking equipment and the men in Tesco sends ingredients and a little bit of pretty simple tech sends leaders, sort of seven step recipes for seven questions that they can read out to agree with. And that was the biggest kind of most profound design that we've done really. [Inaudible] and we're just on the edge of doing some interesting kind of more technical things. But in terms of design, I think that ritual, that seven step recipe with seven questions like 'what's your favorite memory in the place you were born', what's your favorite [inaudible]'. I think that's kind of the most strangely,  most innovative thing that we've done which is certainly either low or can be zero tech.

REIN: I think you were interested in talking about maybe what sort of metrics you use for the nonprofit for the charity to figure out whether you're being successful. How are you trying to measure success?

BEN: At the moment, it's really blunt. We're just measuring social. We're kind of thinking three things, I guess - conversion in a fairly sort of straightforward tech way. So can we use Facebook adverts to friend people in, rather than clicking 'like' on a video on their wall. At least, they click kind of for the first time and probably for a lot of people with a click OK or whatever the equivalent button is. That's been one of the most profound things. So in Cardiff, Emily [inaudible] who had never done anything like this before and had met each other and kind of becoming friends and are leaders of that little local group. And they both clicked on a thing on Facebook and then found themselves in a Catholic church hall and Emily no faith. But through the messaging and whatever it was, we've managed to build a certain type of trust. They show up and then they have this really great experience and then come again and then start doing it for themselves. So that simple thing of kind of conversion can we get people from Facebook into [inaudible]. And obviously along that line with lots of smaller things that we're measuring in terms of kind of sign ups and turn out numbers and lots of other in more detail metrics, that's the kind of broadest one. With that we're also measuring the financial thing because as if all the other things you're trying to do weren't hard enough, we're trying to also see if we can build some kind of financial resilience. Rather than people viewing these experiences as volunteering, we're learning how to communicate and kind of create a membership culture. And that's quite subtle and quite tricky and we're still learning how to do that. We're starting to get some little bit of traction in that. So people are signing up and becoming leaders and paying five pounds to make a kind of commitment to keep doing that and kind of taking ownership of their own little local group.

REIN: So is the idea there to not just have participants but to to turn other people into organizers themselves?

BEN: Yeah. I've always sort of tentative at using the word organizing because it means different things to different people and it's funny to Alinskyite broad based community organizer, invoking the word organizer is kind of sacred thing. And that's pretty funky. What it did teach me over a long period of time is that being a leader is a really important and misunderstood thing. So we are trying to find and cultivate community leaders. And that's increasingly our absolute focus. I think as a part of that journey, we're trying to help those leaders understand that organizing says that we build power to organize people and organize money. It's not rocket science, it's just the kind of he who pays the piper calls the tune. So we want to be kind of owned by our leaders and members then that means that we're on the very first steps of a long road towards being hopefully resiliently, kind of feisty resilient through those membership contributions. Whereas if [inaudible], I mean the vast majority is kind of grown. And we love our [inaudible] and thank you.

SAM: So when you say financial resilience, are you talking about the organization itself?

BEN: I kind of mean both end. I think one of our aims is for diverse communities to be increasing their own financial resilience. In order to do that, we, as an organization, need to be financially resilient to ourselves. I think for a lot of these things, we're trying to kind of embody the vision, the values, and the things that we're also trying to replicate and scale.

SAM: As the son of a sociologist, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how organizations sort of evolve these behaviors to protect themselves and ensure their ongoing existence which is sort of why I asked that. But you said both end, what's the other part? How are you trying to cultivate financial resilience in communities? What are you going for there?

BEN: I think that kind of comes down to we're pretty early days in that. We talk about what one aspiration to measure those things, kind of the psychological and environmental resilience. From my experience of organizing, it's things like just helping people to understand even on a very basic level of how money works. So that can be simple things such as it's far more cost-effective for people to come and eat a meal with us than to eat fast food in a food desert, that cooking itself helps you save a lot of money and kind of more financially resilient, that people trying to translate their skills to new contexts whether they're a refugee or someone who used to work in a car factory that kind of social capital is often the missing piece and helping people to translate to and develop new livelihoods. So it's kind of all interconnected but those are some of the things that we're interested in.

SAM: Certainly. It seems like a lot of people get jobs through those social connections and having that social capital. So, that totally makes sense. Cool, thank you.

BEN: Yes.

SAM: I think you said you're measuring three things: conversion, financial resilience, and what was the last one?

BEN: At the moment, we have several more actually. So maybe I was wrong on that because it sort of depends on what [inaudible].

REIN: Among the things that we are measuring.

BEN: We aren't measuring social contact hours. In some ways, we're probably just kind of keeping track of the number of hours that we've brought people who are really different together well even though we know there's a lot more detail that we want to put into defining well. At the moment, we're measuring conversion, money, social contacts and actually good old fashioned NPS. 

SAM: Net Promoter Score?

BEN: Yeah, that's right. But it's very kind of tech, but it's kind of helpful when we're trying to do the conversions from Facebook to [inaudible]. It's a pretty brutal tool and with some clever math behind it that makes it hard to get and sustain high numbers. I haven't looked for a few days but I'm pretty sure that we haven't hit eight yet. And that's my goal. But we've consistently been above seven and that's still pretty good.

SAM: Yeah. As we're talking about metrics, I realized that -- so, my partner works in nonprofits, specifically she has a long history and career in doing work in nonprofits that address domestic violence and sexual harassment and sexual assault. Sort of a thing that I notice with the stuff that she talks about is that it's really hard to get meaningful data out of a social change enterprise because you can measure things like volunteer hours and you can measure contacts and in grant reports you can say, "We have this many events." But that is the sort of thing that is useful and may help you get more money from donors. But it's not really your goal if your goal is to actually effect social change and that's a lot harder to measure.

BEN: Yeah, that's a [inaudible]. I guess slightly more really important but potentially more surface things that in time we may start measuring and being able to measure effectively and those include things like someone's language ability. I don't know if they still do it but Duolingo used to do a kind of free fairly clunky but pretty straightforward kind of English test. Took about eight minutes and you got a score. I remember a couple of years ago, I'm kind of like, "Can we do something where before our guests, these people seeking sanctuary, people who are refugees, before they arrive, can we find a way to get everyone to take this test so that we can then after x number of meals, can we sort of measure again and see if we can get any correlations or anything." And that stuff is obviously complicated, lots of [inaudible] required. But you know that there is stuff that we may look to start to measure in the future. Language is one. Livelihood is another. It's just like, "Did you get a job?" That stuff's very binary. [Inaudible] in the UK is a huge industry around trying to support vulnerable and low income people into work. And it's something that we've definitely kind of steered away from in terms of our kind of values. But yes there may be some sort of versions of futures where we kind of tentatively interact with those worlds a little bit but yeah those are two sort of examples of things that we could look at to measure over the next year or so. But I'm personally more interested in that kind of deeper more subtle emotional, financial, and environmental resilience stuff.

REIN: I wanted to go back to these cognitive biases and specifically in-group bias and how that affects your work because your work is to try to get people to connect with refugees. And a lot of the people that you're trying to get them to talk to, there's a lot of pressure to put them in an outgroup whether it's as refugees per se or as Muslims or depending on who they are. What is it like in the UK to try to get people to connect with refugees in a personal way?

BEN: [Inaudible] I'm going to tell some stories. I was born in Liverpool and actually this is pretty fresh in my mind because I was back in Liverpool yesterday and it looks like we're going to have our first little launch event [inaudible] in Liverpool literally in the church. That was my dad's Church that I kind of grew up in which is really kind of a nostalgic thing. It was great. And I was there with a colleague yesterday and we dropped in this kind of old people's lunch and it was really cute. When you go back to these places when you're an adult, suddenly everything's fairly small and all of that stuff. A friend walked in, we call him Malcolm. Malcolm is a church warden and he is kind of like an extra uncle and I haven't seen him for at least 10, maybe even 20 years. He'd heard that I was gonna be around, he'd come along to the lunch and it was just really great. [Inaudible]. It was amazing. He was a lawyer and he drove kind of flash car and we always thought he was really cool. And then he took kind of semi-retirement five years ago and now works. He says, "Oh, I don't need the money but I like to kind of do a bit of work." And he works in the factory that prints a lot of the national newspapers in the UK, he does a few hours every week. And hearing him talk about his experience there among a very diverse workforce was really kind of eye-opening. The community that I was in in Liverpool when I was very young, it's very different. The culture where I am now in London where I kind of hang out with techies and artists and kind of the metropolitan liberal kind of silo. But those people I grew up with, they definitely voted for Brexit. And Malcolm's experience there, he is saying that someone came up to him and said, "Mate, do you speak English?" That was a very profound thing because I don't know what the actual numbers are but he has experiences with a lot of the people in that factory. At the same time, [inaudible] that we had a cup of tea and when I went to see him, has increased in value in the little neighbourhood where I grew up has kind of [inaudible] gentrify. It was a pretty rough neighborhood. It's still still got some characters and some rough patches but the house prices has gone up and it's gentrified a lot in a period where the British economy grew a lot and there's a thing called lump of labour fallacy where it says that when people come, the cake get bigger. And that kind of very geeky kind of to show an example is post apartheid South Africa where suddenly half the population is able to enter the workforce. And if economic scarcity was true, then people will lose their jobs. But no, it turns out the South African economy grew massively. And I think the numbers bear out, the British economy grew when we allowed a lot of people to come from Eastern Europe. But there's the kind of flipside to the coin that Malcolm doesn't feel like home is still the same. He doesn't feel like he belongs anymore and he feels that something is lost, something is missing, something is kind of fractured. It's really hard and intangible but I guess hearing him tell this story, it feels hard for me to judge. I know that economically, he's probably wealthier for [inaudible] experience. But socially, we haven't quite cracked it like we live in a hyper-mobile global world where the stories we tell haven't kept up with the economic financial benefits of people moving around.

And also obviously, the idea of modernization is and what kind of neighborhoods and communities. So I think certainly when it comes to Brexit, people were asked one question, they answered another. They were asked, "Do you want to be in the EU?" And they basically said, "We don't feel at home anymore." The rules have changed and many of us worry that either kind of old and wealthy and nostalgic and scared and we want to mythologize history and don't tell us otherwise." Or with younger and poorer, and the rules are changed and it's not just that we're left behind but we were often not allowed on the bus. So there's kind of justice issues and then there's these subtle kind of culture and challenges of the stories we tell ourselves and that we tell each other about ourselves. We saw what the refugee crisis in Syria did when a million people were displaced. You don't have to be to kind of scientifically literate to see that it's not gonna be that long before 100 million people are displaced. And they speak different languages and they are not us. So there's the kind of economic reality, but then there's also the challenge of learning how to tell the stories of a bigger us.

SAM: Your climate change example is a good one. It's really scary for a lot of people to think about climate change because it brings up a whole lot of global economic forces. And I know we like to think that we can individually affect climate change but really it has to be addressed at a policy level and that's not something that I can personally do a lot about. I don't feel like it's tractable. I don't know what action I can take. But I can focus on somebody who doesn't look like me, who's coming in and "taking our jobs", whatever the hell that means. And it's easy to focus on that instead. And that gives me something to do and I feel better about myself.

BEN: Yeah, 100%. And I guess for me it seems relatively self-evident that people who want to retain power and have read their Machiavelli can say divide and conquer, so telling the communities who have lost their jobs. I'm not with Malcolm, I went and knocked on the door of some friends and it was just so good to see them. And it has been more than 20 years since I've seen Frank and Elaine. Elaine came down to the Brexit March and the [inaudible] that was on the same day that me and my dad went on the anti-Brexit March. I'm really excited about the next time I go to be able to see if we can have a conversation about that. I want to understand what our experience with the world is because who am I to tell her otherwise. I told her, "Good for you. You got on the train and came all the way down to London because you care enough and believe in this thing and kind of pro political engagement." But it doesn't add up to me. I don't see how leaving the European Union will make the future more stable or a better world for her grandchildren who she dearly loves. And I think she would disagree. I think she thinks that is the way to go. So it's a hard [inaudible] because I don't want to patronize anyone. For example, the EU and kind of neo liberal consensus is really problematic. And I think people who vote Brexit and maybe even vote Trump, the things that they're angry about are often legit but how do we tell a different and a bigger story that doesn't scapegoat the other, the browner, less male, less straight other.

SAM: Yeah. I like that you're talking with your friends, you're talking about having those individual conversations and it sounds like that's what you're trying to do with your non-profit as well.

BEN: Yeah, I hope so. I think it's important to practice what you preach, I think. We're a small team but I'm incredibly proud of the amazing humans I get to work with. I learned a huge amount every day from them and I think we genuinely try to kind of live out some of these things that include doing the hard work of having negotiating our differences without even having hard conversations with people we disagree with, learning how to disagree well.

REIN: Sam, this seems like a good time to move into reflections.

SAM: It does. I'll have to think of what I can reflect on.

REIN: I will be name dropping another philosopher because that is the thing that I do.

SAM: I don't think we've checked off the Virginia Satir box. 

REIN: Oh, I was going to mention that. As it turns out, Ben, Virginia Satir has a quote that I really like which is that, "We come together through our sameness and we grow through our differences."

BEN: Nice.

SAM: Very nice.

REIN: This conversation has been a lot for me, as they always are. And people who have listened to this podcast will not be surprised that I like to understand the philosophical underpinnings for the things that I believe. And when we're talking about bringing people together, taking these theories and these ideas about how the world should be and turning those into action, I think a lot about a philosopher named Calvin Schrag who wrote a book titled 'The Self after Postmodernity'. And his idea is that the self is found in the intersection of discourse action and community. The idea that the self is -- he calls it Praxis-oriented. And so when we take our theories about how the world should be, when we take the discourse that's floating around about our models of the world and we want to turn that into action which is what Praxis is, that action is necessarily interaction with the world around us and with other people. There is no Praxis that isn't communicative, that doesn't interact with the world. And so, his model is called Communicative Praxis and I think it's very interesting.

BEN: That's great.

SAM: For me, there are two things that stand out about this conversation. Just a little phrase that caught my attention early on in the show was the commodification of trust. We chatted about this sort of out [inaudible] and decided that there wasn't that much to unpack but I did at least want to call back to it because when you were talking about not going in strangers' cars and in their houses and then brought up Lyft and Airbnb, for example, it caught my attention because that's something that I've often heard made as a joke but I hadn't really thought about how you might be able to exploit that change in our society and use it in the way that you're using it now. And so, I think that's really interesting. The other thing that really is sticking with me at the end of this call is this idea of fostering these individual connections. It seems to me to be both a really powerful and effective way of strengthening communities at an individual level and then it also makes me think about something that, Rein, I think you were tweeting about recently, which is this idea of the Tyranny of Structurelessness which is an old influential essay that many people have many opinions about. But the basic idea is that if you structure a group in such a way that there are no explicit leaders, you will have only implicit power structures. And I think for me, the real takeaway from this is that in any organization, there are both explicit and implicit power structures. And I like that what you're doing, Ben, is that you are working on changing the implicit ones by connecting individuals to each other and changing the way that they both interact with the people that they've met and then maybe see how that affects their behavior in a larger context. So, thank you for doing that work.

BEN: Thank you. That's a really beautiful reflection. I think one reflection is partly genuine. It's a real privilege to have a kind of safe space to reflect together. I haven't been a follower of the podcast but I definitely will do, with lots that I anticipate learning in the future in these conversations. So, thank you for the opportunity.

It's amazing to have the kind of mixture of the quite practical, quite local, at times mundane, and very real but then being able to just reflect in conversations like this and trying to situate these very specific local conversations that happen around real tables with some of the challenges we're facing across the world.

We did a couple of meals and did one in D.C. and in New York and in Toronto about a year ago and have really focused on raising money and doing things in the UK. But I really hope that there is a future where we could have some more meals on your side of the pond as well. So yeah, let's hope that that becomes possible one day.

SAM: I would love to see that. Well, thank you very much, Ben, and thank you listeners for sticking with us for another show. If you've enjoyed this, of course you can listen to more of our shows. We have a bunch of back ones you can listen to. If you feel like helping us out, you can leave us a review on iTunes. That is always appreciated. Also, if you would like to join us for other conversations along these lines, we do have a Slack community. And if you donate to us any amount on Patreon, that's Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, then we will invite you into our Slack and you can hang out with a couple hundred other like-minded folks. And it is a lovely loving space to hang out and have some interesting conversations you might not otherwise. So once again, thank you very much and we'll be back at you next week.