Shadi Hamid is a columnist and Editorial Board member at The Washington Post and a research professor of Islamic Studies at Fuller Seminary. He has authored several books, including The Problem of Democracy and Islamic Exceptionalism. Hamid is also the co-founder of Wisdom of Crowds.

Dr. Samuel Kimbriel is a political philosopher, author, and founding director of Aspen’s Philosophy & Society Initiative. He is the author of Friendship as Sacred Knowing: Overcoming Isolation. He writes widely on solidarity, ideology, democracy, power, and trust for outlets including The Washington Post and BBC. Kimbriel is Contributing Editor at Wisdom of Crowds.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

David: I want to welcome our guests to the Templeton ideas podcast. I’m here with Sam Kimbriel and Shadi Hamid. I’m gonna let the two of you introduce yourselves. Sam, why don’t you start?  

Sam: Yeah, my name is Sam Kimbriel. I’m a political philosopher and also a metaphysician by training. I now direct the Philosophy and Society Initiative at the Aspen Institute, which is specifically dedicated to figuring out how you can build a public intellectual tradition, especially meaning, the capacity to talk about existential questions very directly and robustly in public, and honestly. 

I wrote my first book about the philosophical history of loneliness. So, I’m really interested in these kinds of like the movement between big public issues and very private, intimate ones. And then also questions about the meaning of life and things like that.  

One of our associations with Shadi is we work very closely together on a publication called Wisdom of Crowds, which is very much about stimulating this sort of public intellectual argument in all kinds of ways. 

We’ve been working on a project with Templeton, I think currently we’re calling it Philosophy in Society, which is a lovely title, and, it involves a number of components which we can talk about in the conversation, including a, Philosophy Salon, which, involves bringing a lot of kind of pivotal DC figures together, and then, being able to debate primary, first principle questions with them. 

And it’s been an incredibly fascinating experience for both of us to watch as people who normally wouldn’t be able to talk about primary questions, but then also have very strong ideological or disciplinary reasons that they don’t actually know how to talk to each other that well. And just seeing how deep and profound their kind of communication and community has become through this. 

David: Shadi?  

Shadi: Yeah, so I am currently a columnist and member of the editorial board at the Washington Post. I’m also a research professor of Islamic studies at Fuller Seminary. And I am the co-founder and cohost of Wisdom of Crowds, which Sam just mentioned. 

I focus a lot on questions of religion and democracy and how they intersect.   My most recent book is called The Problem of Democracy, which is really about what do we do when democracy produces bad outcomes? How do we learn to live with them? And I think a lot of my work is concerned with this overarching question of deep difference, the reality of it, the inevitability of it, and how we can live through it and thrive.  

David: Our listeners may be gathering that both of our guests are prolific. And I should say, in full transparency, that Shadi and I are former colleagues at the Brookings Institute, and we have that background that we share together.   

So, let me start by asking both of you, a couple of personal questions, the first being, why do you do what you do?  

Shadi: Oh boy, why do I do what I do? I guess that is the question. So, I think that the reality that we’re in, in America, but also more broadly in any kind of big, messy, diverse society, our daily experience is one of collision, of conflict. And I’m of the view that conflict is inevitable. And that when we try to transcend conflict or erase it, we cause more problems because then we’re really erasing the real diversity that is just with us. 

We no longer have dominant ideologies where everyone is on board. I mean, we’re not talking about the premodern era where in Christian or Muslim majority societies The hegemony of those faith traditions was uncontested. 

There was nothing called liberalism. There was nothing called secularism. In the modern period, it just is fundamentally different So that’s why, one of the taglines for wisdom of crowds is agreement is nice. Disagreement is better. 

David: I love it. 

Shadi: Thank you. And I think there’s just also this, this broader insight that drives me that, foundational divides in our country, and we shouldn’t have to suppress who we are when we’re entering the public arena. And when we talk too much about consensus and unity, then we’re creating something false. 

We’re not going to have a consensus in America around foundational questions having to do with. What it means to live a good life. What is the role of religion in public life? What is the nature of the state? What does it mean to be American? Those aren’t policy questions. They can’t be resolved through technocratic debate. 

We should hold on to Our foundational convictions and principles and when anyone tells us that we have to get on board with some common good or with some consensus. That’s when we have to be quite nervous because to create a consensus means in effect to impose it because of the reality of the messiness and diversity of American society. 

David: Sam, why do you do what you do? 

Sam: It’s interesting, Shadi and I have worked together for, four or five years now. Building this project at Aspen, at Wisdom of Crowds and a few other things. And it’s interesting how much, we share a lot of the explicit things, like how, we want to work and what we care about. but I think we, probably come out at it from different, angles. for me, I grew up in the mountains in Colorado at 9,000 feet. 

There was, a kind of background sense of reverence, I think, in that environment that got in just very deeply at a very early age. And, that has, in my adult life then, produced a kind of sense both of, not being afraid of conflict, it feels to me that the world has a depth and wholeness to it at a really basic level, and so if you go and explore it without fear, that it’s amenable to that, and that involves also doing that with other people, having a kind of frankness and honesty about what life is like for you and how it works like we all have these kind of evasion mechanisms to stay away from sensitive topics and ourselves I think like places that feel a bit of pain or Ambiguity and I think that the ability to kind of get down into them for me has ended up being One of the richest parts of my life and it shows up in the philosophy stuff and in the writing And speaking stuff we do it also shows up in other places though. 

Like I’m a pretty serious backcountry skier. I run four times a week, and then also write poetry and it feels like all of these are different attempts to explore the same kind of territory. 

David: I’m curious, and this is again a little bit more on the personal, if there’s a formative experience in either of your lives that you feel put you on this path, or maybe more than one.  

Shadi: Yeah, so there’s also a strong personal element to what I do. I think that by discussing philosophy and the questions around meaning, and life and friendship. It’s a way for me to work through my own internal struggles, if I can put it that way. I think there is a crisis of meaning in our country. I think a lot of us feel that something intuitively just isn’t quite right. 

A lot of us are yearning for something that is greater. And I think a lot of us end up groping in the dark. It’s not easy, and I’ve had my own struggles with trying to figure out what kind of person I want to be, and how do I want to live my life. What does it mean to have a good life is not just a philosophical question. It’s not even a primarily philosophical question. It’s a personal question, and it implicates every one of us. I honestly have doubts that I’ve lived the life I maybe should have lived.  

Not to be overly dramatic, but I think we all have doubts, and we could have all lived alternative lives. And I guess for me too, questions around the intersection of philosophy and religion get at these questions. And to the extent that I can illuminate that for myself and in doing so to help other people I mean, that’s not going to lead to mass political change. 

It’s not going to result in policy changes. But if some people can hear what I and my colleagues say when we’re in these kinds of discussions and then they can see how we model those kinds of interactions. It can help them think through some of their own challenges in maybe a new and hopefully more constructive way. 

So, for me, I’m thinking more about how we can think more about a theory of change that is a little more communally or locally oriented. And that can be maybe less ambitious in some ways, but in another sense, more ambitious.  

David: Sam? 

Sam: It’s interesting. I think that for me, the story again is probably a little bit less about public affairs and more intimate. The primary things that have thrown me into this are things like friendship where the experience of being in the world and having such like intense feelings, but then finding that you can actually gradually come to explore that with other people.  

I have two especially close friends from graduate school and one, from growing up in Colorado and in all three of those cases there’s a kind of astonishment that you can’t have a shared world in that sense, that there’s not just full isolation. I remember with one of them as we were becoming friends in graduate school, thinking, “Wait, this is confusing like the thing that’s usually only inside my own head is now something that he’s saying outside of me without prompting,” and that was such a moving experience. How that then translates into the direction that I’ve gone with this, it’s something like that that you’re trying to do when you’re teaching. 

So, I was in my first academic job and teaching a lot of this kind of stuff, like deep questions about what the nature of life is and what the nature of politics is. And I think my students were eating it up. But I also kept feeling like this work should be much more public than just a classroom, actually. That the work of what it means to live together, what it is to build a society, the question of how to live well is not just an individual question. And so, I had that frustration. And then suddenly, in the middle of that, Brexit happened in the UK. And, that sort of threw me into public life pretty directly, working with several think tanks in London on this, in large part because of the work that I’ve done on loneliness in politics. 

And you can ask these like primary metaphysical what’s the meaning of everything questions in a way that’s directly engaged at the highest level within the UK with the BBC and with Westminster. There were like philosophy book launches in Parliament, all of these kinds of things. 

And, it felt like, okay, this is finally the actually serious work. You’re asking serious questions in the context of institutions that are primarily responsible for the societies that you’re making. And I thought, okay, like if you could really build structures at that level that are robust enough to be able to ask these questions, well, that’s very much worth doing. 

David: Yeah, I completely agree with all of that. It’s as important to affect how people think as to affect what people think. 

So, let’s go back to the project that you’re currently doing. I think what listeners might be interested to hear about is that there are smart people like yourselves in Washington talking about big philosophical ideas. The general perception is everybody’s just arguing over policy.  

So maybe if you could say some more about, first why this project, and in, in a minute, we’ll get into what you’re learning. 

Sam: Yeah, so I’ll just give a quick summary of what we’re doing and, a couple of insights about it. So, this came out in that sort of post Trump, post Brexit period. I had really a reflection that there are a lot of people who are very engaged in very important roles at the State Department or Treasury, working on in Congress, at the White House and in media roles who are all close to these kinds of what I call like architectonic shifts in the society, like these deep, profound reconfigurings of what’s happening 

And they know that the questions are bigger than the ones that they’re able to think about during their day jobs, but they really don’t have context or venue to be thinking about that. And in the middle of that, I met another journalist called Asitwa Nebu, who had a University of Chicago training, very smart, deeply read, but then involved in this kinds of like quick pace media environment. 

And he and I just started thinking like, what could you build that would actually be able to relate to that need very directly and so we created the project that we’re doing with JTF, which is a philosophy salon in which we debate one word for a year. 

So, we invite a closed group, usually, maybe 18 show up for a given night. And then, there’s a primary theme that we’re considering the whole year. So, we’ve done democracy, tragedy, this year we’re doing home as the theme, and we’ll do maybe 30 to 40 pages of reading per session. Everyverything from articles in the Atlantic or poetry from Ukraine, to Nietzsche or Aristotle writing about the nature of tragedy. We went to see King Lear together as a group a couple s ago.  

And the map is very diverse. So, you have a kind of whole range of ideologies. But because we’re arguing about a big word, not a small one, it creates an incredibly different dynamic than I, at least I’ve experienced in other contexts. I’d be interested in Shadi’s experience of this. 

And you do end up getting both energy and group feeling and fervor in it. 

And then also, real disagreement, like the right version of conflict where people have deep feelings about these things. They really do wonder and care about them in a particular way.  

And then, wisdom of crowds, is an attempt to take that same mood as Shadi said, the motto is, “Agreement is nice, but disagreement is better.” And have that same mood, that same feeling, but have it spill out much more publicly. So, through podcasts, through a bunch of writing that we do, we’ll do like debates where I’ll write a letter to Shadi about something I’m really annoyed about, what he thinks, and then he’ll write back three paragraphs and we’ll go back and forth for, a few letters and then publish it all, and do that with our, readers as well. 

David: As I understand it, there are three strategic assumptions with this project, one is that you think that we are papering over the importance of conviction. Two is that there is an optimistic relationship between humility and knowledge. And the third is that you’ve articulated the problem with our approach to difference and conviction, and you’ve come up with this term, convictional pluralism. 

So, let’s just say convictional pluralism is one of the strategic assumptions. That’s the premise from which it seems that you’re approaching work. Shadi, could you talk more about that? 

Shadi: So, I think Sam and I are both fascinated by the question of belief. Where do beliefs come from? And what we try to do on Wisdom of Crowds is to always go several steps further or deeper than the surface. Which might seem like an obvious thing to do, but it’s actually not as obvious or common as we might like. But to take a step back, withhold judgment, and talk to people who have what we might consider to be not just objectionable views, but maybe even more than objectionable views and to say, okay, let’s unspool this. Where are these ideas coming from? Why do you believe what you believe? 

 And it turns out that people have a lot of difficulty answering the question of where their beliefs come from. You’d be surprised. And anyone who’s listening can try this as an experiment 

David: Did it surprise you as you learned that? That people have a hard time? 

Shadi: Yeah, I think it did surprise me, but honestly, I started asking myself where my beliefs come from too. And the answers there can also be surprising.  

There’s two ways to look at it. Like one, I realized that there are core convictions that are really dear to me, but then I realized that there are other beliefs that are somewhat contingent. They could have been otherwise they were not set in stone. And the more I think about them, I can almost imagine not having them if circumstances were different.  It’s actually somewhat confusing. And we as human beings, we contain multitudes, and we are contradictory and our beliefs are not internally coherent. 

And if we had had different experiences at a particular time in our lives, and we didn’t have one of those formative moments that we had, we could have gone in quite a different direction.  

And it ties very well with intellectual humility as a general posture. That once we see the contingency, And the contradicting nature of our own beliefs, then we can become more intellectually humble. And then we can approach other ideas with a kind of generosity of spirit. Let’s say. 

Sam: Can I just tell one story here?  

In the course of doing the salon last few years, I guess like my observation, Shadi, is that as you’ve kind of had to argue that way, you’ve been able to clarify much more directly your sense of conviction about religion and how that’s shown up and gradually, you’ve come to excavate, the source of those convictions more.  

Shadi: Look, I’m really glad you brought that up. Over the course of the past few years, I started to realize that religion and being Muslim were coloring certain things in ways that I didn’t fully grasp we had to kind of bring them out onto the surface. So, for example, conversations about where do human rights come from? Why do I care so much about democracy? I did start to realize that it really does come down, at least in large part, maybe not entirely, to my belief in God. That without a conception of God, and that the implications of their being in God, I wouldn’t feel as strongly as I did. 

I mean, my belief in democracy is closely tied to my belief in God.  

I didn’t actually realize that before, like six years ago, I would never have described it in the way that I just did. My friends and, colleagues here through our discussions, they helped me realize things that were just like, hovering underneath the surface. That’s, that’s an incredible thing. 

David: And is it fair to say that growth wouldn’t have happened if the group of you hadn’t been willing to have been in conflict with each other? 

Shadi: Yeah, I mean, totally. my Wisdom of Crowds cohost, Damir, he isn’t a believer. He kept on pushing me and pushing me and we, we do fundamentally disagree. I mean, it’s a pretty large disagreement when you disagree about the existence of God. 

David: So, talking to someone who didn’t believe in God helped you become more of a believer.  

Shadi: Yes. 

David: Is this the notion of convictional pluralism as the two of you call it? Is this an example of convictional pluralism?  

Sam: I would say yes. So, you know, my I basically have the opposite diagnosis of our current moment than most of the ones you hear in the media, which are that, essentially, public discourse has become way too savage. It’s suddenly spilling out into kind of acrimony and anger. We need to reintroduce things like civility and, tame the storm in some way. I basically think it’s the opposite, which is, we’re actually a culture that has lost the skill to ask big questions or go into extreme places and I think the way to put is we ask superficial questions, but then we ask them savagely. 

Shadi: It’s like the worst of both. 

Sam: Yeah, it’s really bad. But it’s right, exactly. So, it’s not that we’re not being really brutal to each other. We are doing that also, but I think that my diagnosis of that is that the reason that we’re being brutal is specifically because we have Deeper things that we feel and that we care about and that really we don’t want to let go of But then we don’t have a public venue in which we can allow them to come out directly and honestly. 

So, the convictional pluralism thing, I think, is the view that, we want convictions, we want them to be strong and strongly held. And that, we need actually societal refining mechanisms so you can actually see the truth of the thing and do that with people who will have very different convictions than you. 

It builds a possibility for, developing a society that we don’t have in the current situation.  

David: I think the kind of growth that Shadi is talking about at a personal level Wouldn’t be possible. Clearly you said this, Shadi. It wouldn’t be possible without the conflict. 

Shadi: I’m very comfortable saying that. No doubt. Yep. 

David: And then I think it’s fair to say I think that if you remove conflict as a piece of society you by definition will also if not eliminate, then reduce the opportunities for growth in the society as a whole, just like it’s happening with the individual, right? Micro and macro.  

Sam: This point actually then hits at the thing that, I think most large, national institutions and people that are trying to think about our whole political situation are really worried about, which is, it seems like a, civilization that previously was able to develop and create things, create institutions, create, kind of social consensus, and now it just seems like it’s gradually decaying. 

 I think that’s probably basically correct, that you do have this period of the devolution of society in some way. But I don’t think that is inevitable. I don’t think that we’re stuck in this kind of inertial pattern where it’s just going to gradually crumble. I think it’s possible to build things, and the question is how do we get down to that kind of human capacity to have blood and life and intensity and fire in such a way that you could start imagining things worth building? 

David: All right, well, as I understand it, the two of you have suggested that if we accept this notion of convictional pluralism, then there are questions which we should be focused on. that will enable us to build the muscle to be able to live with, as you’ve also said Shadi, with deep difference, right? Some of those questions are what gives life purpose? What does human flourishing actually mean? What makes for a good society and who defines the good?  

Those would be three. So, let’s spend a few minutes. Talking about those. 

Sam: Let me start with just, like, one quick story. 

David: Yeah, please. 

Sam: So, at the holidays last year, I was back in Colorado and was, having dinner with a friend from Yale and, we were talking about exactly this kind of stuff. Like what is meaning? Like, how does it work? We’re talking about the role of nature in our lives and then suddenly the waitress interrupted and she said I just want you to know that both me and the other waitress We’ve been eavesdropping for about 20 minutes and We don’t have anyone else to talk to about these things and they really matter to us. And we’re just wondering if we could sit and talk to you for a little while. And it became this like really lovely conversation Moving conversation. We did actually talk to him for about an hour. And, it really hits me the two things about that one that community is one of the things that people are looking for and That is part of purpose. I think the ability to actually develop your life in such a way that there are other people who are there with you and then secondly that involves curiosity. Like there’s a kind of searching and restlessness all of us have, and the more that we become sensitive, the more intense it becomes, actually. 

 And the ability to develop those two things together, like a capacity for curiosity or searching along with other people, feels to me pretty close to how I’d want to define these things, like flourishing or, human purpose. 

David: Shadi? 

Shadi: Oh, these are big questions. I feel like it might be a bit presumptuous for me to claim that I have the answer to the meaning of life. 

David: These are the questions we ask at the John Templeton Foundation. 

Shadi: Exactly, yeah. Look, I think a lot of us know how to live a good life, I think the challenge is actually doing it. my very basic answer, would be the three F’s and the C, and that’s not very catchy, but family, faith, friendship, and community.  

Sam: You can change the C to sort of an F by using Philos. 

Shadi: Oh, ok, yea.  

One thing I think about is choice. We live in a liberal society. And none of us can avoid the reality that we’re confronted with endless choices. And I think for a lot of us, it’s overwhelming. So, I think that one of the key questions that individuals, like, need to ask themselves, or maybe should, is, what do we do about the problem of choice, or if you will, the paradox of choice? Because, I mean, we know from behavioral economics that having too many choices actually makes us unhappier. 

David: I call it the ketchup problem, when you go to the grocery store and have too many choices of ketchup. Same kind of thing.  

Shadi: So, how do we find ways to constrain choice, but not in a way that Prevents us from being open to the world or being curious about the world and it is a kind of delicate balance. And I think the question of religious orthodoxy is tied to this. one thing that religion does is that it gives us structure. It brings order to chaos. It limits our choices.  

And I’m just fascinated by the relationship between religion and choice. and then what that means really for the rest of our lives after we make these kinds of decisive choices about the kinds of religious and spiritual lives that we want to live. And that’s going to obviously be different for different people, but I think there’s a similar set of questions that can be asked. 

Sam: So my sense about this? So, it’s not just a matter of like, community or order or purpose. I’m really fascinated by the way that those things don’t work or sort of fail if there’s not insight behind them. So this goes back to the question you asked us about intellectual humility and the way it relates to knowledge.  

I think for me, like, the thing about the waitress example is that she’s searching and she’s looking for an answer. Answers about what’s real and what is actually gonna have meaning, and I think it can’t just be choice or self-will at that point like something has to appear for you And I don’t think that necessarily 

I don’t think that necessarily needs to be religious. I think there are many instances that I can think of in history where someone has a kind of insight like a feeling that There is harmony or unity or depth to the world. I think a lot of poetry about beauty works this way.  

Actually, there’s a quote in Augustine’s confessions. He has a mystical vision, and he says, “I came back and I didn’t know what the truth was, but I knew that truth was.” And I think that kind of an experience, that there’s a reality that’s big enough to be amenable to human inquiry and human desire, that, feels to me like it’s pretty important. 

David:  

I mean, on the humility and knowledge point, right, I think humility is a value, People can discern their values. The question of where or why they’re decerning those values is even more of a first principles question and for some of us it is a matter of faith. But for others it’s not. And I don’t know where that comes from, but you decern what your value is, you make a choice.  

We talk in our family about how every day is a choice. You choose something, whatever it is. You move forward from that choice, and then you make another one and then you go on.   

I do completely agree with the two of you that trying to think through the foundations, the values that underlie beliefs, is really critical for having more meaningful conversations with others.  

Sam: Just as one kind of way to emphasize what you’re taking about, so there was a really interesting conversation in the salon. At one point, we were doing a conversation about human rights as a subsection. So we’re reading Montesquieu and the French Revolution, Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizens. And there were a number of, people in the, the group who were, completely convinced about the policy outcome of this. Like, the idea of human dignity and the protection of rights is, developing a society the kind that they want it to have. 

 But then, because of the way those documents are written, they said but I don’t believe any of the background philosophical justification for human dignity That is backing this up. Like I think this seems like kind of abstract superstition to me, and I know that’s a problem and I don’t know what to do with it. And that’s one of the kinds of most rewarding things about this kind of work where You actually have to push someone to the point where they realize oh there’s an incoherence here and I need to actually pursue  

David: Yeah, I mean, absolutely. as a believer, I really have a hard time grasping how a non-believer comes to appreciate the value of a human being, of an individual human being. And I’m not by any means suggesting that someone else doesn’t figure it out for themselves. Many good people who do, but for me, that’s just where it comes from. I don’t get another interpretation. 

Sam: Yeah, and I think I think this is kind of a diagnosis of where the kind of institutional landscape is shifting, which is that we have a lot of legacy institutions that believe very strongly in things like human dignity and were built directly around them. like the UN Declaration of Human Rights, for example, but now don’t know how to retroactively give a philosophical justification for why this should be the case. And so, they end up in these kinds of gradual institutional decay situations, I think, in many instances. 

David: This is a good place to wrap up and actually where we plan to wrap up, which is around your theory of change. So, Both of you live and work in Washington. You’re admits national politics and national institutions. You’re positing that there needs to be a space for people to have debates about first principles, and that they need to be rooted in convictional pluralism where they feel comfortable, relating to each other around deep difference. 

So, in an ideal world, let’s say this happens. How will that manifest differently in terms of how our institutions deal with individuals? what would be the outcome? 

Sam: I’ll say a couple things and then Shadi can jump in. So, when we set this project up, you do like short term strategic planning, and then you do a what if everything changes planning about the whole world. And I think the picture that we have always thought about there is, you end up having enough of the national ecosystem that really gets the seriousness of the kinds of questions we’re talking about to the degree that Anyone who’s looking for it can find it. So you have big verticals at the New York Times or at the Atlantic that are just directly doing very serious writing about first principles in this kind of way. I want, that waitress to be able to turn on the television and immediately find the thing that she was looking for, which is a community who can ask these kinds of questions. 

 Right now, we have think tanks dedicated to economics. You have economists at the New York Times. You have economists on political staffs. I would love to have philosophers in all those roles. And I think that should be very, very widespread.  

Now, what’s the effect of all of that? There are policy questions and there are questions that should be dealt with in certain technical ways. And so, when you’re dealing with how you want to build cities, there’s part where you’re trying to understand traffic flows and the data that deals with transportation. 

And then there’s part that’s like, what are cities for, and how do they work, and what is a good life, and why are we building a city block, and what does it mean for a person to grow up here, and how does that work? And being able to shuffle between those two registers as just a basic, natural, cultural habit, feels to me, like, a world that I like the world around me. I think it should, I think, I think all 

Sam: I think all of us should have a bit of both. And I think that within a normal institution, you have to go talk to the lawyers to figure out how you don’t get yourself in the newspapers or in court. And I think it should be the same that when you’re thinking seriously about building things, you have to have a place where there’s a moral vetting about what we’re going to do and why are we doing it?  

David: Are those the same people? Are you suggesting that the person who is responsible for thinking about where you put the traffic light is also thinking about “Why are we here?” 

Sam: I think all of us should have a bit of both. And I think that within a normal institution you have to talk to the lawyers to try and figure out how you don’t get yourself in the newspapers or in court. And I think it should be the same. that when you’re serious about building things, you have to have a place where there’s a moral vetting about what’ we’re going to do and why we’re going to do it.  

David: Organizational culture?  

Sam: Yea. 

David: Shadi?  

Shadi: I mean, look, not to sound like too ambitious about it, but I think the project here and Sam was getting at this, we want to change how Americans think and debate and disagree and we want it to be felt nationally and publicly. This isn’t just about, a couple intellectual scenes here and there and a couple communities scattered around the country, but for this to be reflected in the culture. That’s why this word, culture is really important. We want it to reshape American culture. But at the same time, the best we can do is the best we can do. There’s also like a sense that a lot of these things are outside of any individual or groups control. And our job is to do the best we can, which again might sound trite, but hopefully they will be able to start to notice things. And, ultimately people will start to feel something different in their own lives and in the institutions that they’re part of.  

But it is definitely a medium to long term project, we just want to persuade as many people as possible to be open to this possibility and to do whatever they can in their own respective realms to advance this vision where we’re popularizing first principles, we’re popularizing the question of why do we believe what we believe and giving people the tools to be able to ask those questions day in and day out.  

David: Well, for my own part, I think when you mentioned intellectual humility earlier, you really put your finger on it. I’ve come to believe that humility is foundational to so much of what the two of you have been discussing. 

And I think that, when you have that kind of relationship between humility and knowledge, it also allows the space for that kind of convictional pluralism that you’re suggesting. So, I think if just simply. More humility was an outgrowth of, bringing people together and having them be willing to be open to talking to each other. That would be a great success and if that filtered out into the culture, we’d be better off than we are now.  

 I know that you’re hoping to do more down the road, and so I hope we’ll have a chance to come back together, in the future and talk more about it and hear how things are going. 

Sam: That sounds brilliant, I’d love that.  

David: Thank you both. I really enjoyed this.  

Shadi: Thanks, David.  

Sam: Thank you so much, David.