Heidi:  Hi, this is Heidi Burgess, and I'm here today with Guy Burgess. We're both with Beyond Intractability. And we're very honored to be talking to Congressional Representative Derek Kilmer, who is from the Sixth Congressional District in Washington State, although in just a couple of days, he's going to be retiring from a post that he's held since 2013 and move on to other challenges (as if there could be any challenge bigger than the one that he has held for the last, what, 12 years or so.)

We are really excited to be talking to Representative Kilmer because he's one of our heroes, one of my heroes, anyway. He has done an enormous amount to help depolarize what appears to me (and many other people in the United Statesaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa0 to be a very polarized institution, that being Congress. He has successfully tworked bipartisanly (across the aisle) and has proven that that sort of work is possible. Guy used to work with a professor, Kenneth Boulding, who coined Boulding's First Law that said, "If it exists, it must be possible." And I see your work and the House Select Committee and the follow-on House Modernization Subommittee as proof that depolarization of highly polarized spaces is indeed possible— because you did it.

And the thing we need to do is to learn what you did and how. And I have three hours worth of questions. I'm going to condense them all into one that asks you to kind of jump to the chase. You're leaving. What are the lessons that you think you can hand down to others, based on your many years of work, about how other people, both in Congress and outside, people who are interested in reducing polarization in this country, how can they go about doing it? What have you learned that you see as most important?

Rep. Kilmer: Well, I appreciate the question and I appreciate your interest in the work that we did. I think my primary takeaway from the work is that if you want things to work differently, sometimes you have to do things differently.

One of the first meetings we had of the Modernization Committee looked historically at the success (or lack thereof) of reform efforts in Congress. We had this great presentation from a historian from the Congressional Research Service who would say things like, "Well, in the failed effort of this year, this happened. And in the only somewhat successful effort of this year, that happened. So there was an acknowledgment that, by and large, these select committees aren't particularly successful and that at some point, history would include our undertaking.

So there was a choice. Would we want it to be characterized as an abject failure, or would we want it to demonstrate some success? And that, for me, really framed our work.

Acknowledging that select committees, by and large, don't pass any recommendations. And if they do, they're not bipartisan. I had a choice to make as the leader of this committee in saying, "Okay, do we want to be like everybody else, or do we want to try to have some success?" 

I remember when Speaker Pelosi asked me "Would you be willing to run this committee?" And I said, "Sure." And she said, "How many people do you want on it?" And I said, "I think it should be an equal number, six Democrats and six Republicans." And in fact, I think that we should require a supermajority vote for passing any recommendations." And she said, "Well, you know you're in the majority, right? You don't have to do it that way." And I said, "Well, I'm just of the belief that if we want to have durable change and systemic change within the institution, it needs to be bipartisan. Because otherwise, we'll make a change. And then when Republicans are in charge, they'll make a change back. And we'll just swing back and forth, rather than doing something that's durable." And to her credit, she said, "Great. Okay. Go for it."

When a committee is created, the first thing that happens is you get your budget. And I remember calling my Republican counterpart, Tom Graves, who's a very conservative Georgia Republican. In fact, his district is now held by Marjorie Taylor Greene. And I called Tom and I said, "you know, usually, what happens here is our committee gets its budget, and then we do simple math, and you get your part of the money, and you hire people with a Republican background who put on red jerseys, and I hire people with a Democratic background who put on blue jerseys, and then we'll spend the rest of our time fighting with each other." Then I said, "I have a crazy idea for you. What if we don't do that? What if we agree that we're going to hire one team, and some of them will be people with a Democratic background, and some will be people with a Republican background, but we will make every hiring decision together." And rather than putting on red and blue jerseys, they'll just put on jerseys that say, "Hey, let's fix Congress." And to his credit, he said, "Well, you know my leadership's probably going to hate that idea, but let's do it."

If you watch one of our hearings on C-SPAN, you have too much time on your hands. But if you did watch one of our hearings on C-SPAN, you'll notice we didn't sit with Democrats on one side of a dais and Republicans on the other side of the dais. We sat Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican. Why? Well, when I hear a witness say something interesting that's valuable food for thought, my genetic predisposition, and I think that my colleagues do the same thing, is to lean over to the person next to us and say, "Hey, that was kind of interesting. What do you think about that?" And in our committee, you leaned over to someone from a different party.

We didn't even sit at a dais. We sat around a big round table. Why? Well, I don't know about you. but I've never had a good conversation speaking to the back of somebody's head. And so in our committee, we sat around a big round table where we looked each other in the eye and we were not above our witnesses. We were on the same level as our witnesses, actually trying to think through how to solve problems together, not to score points, not to make speeches that we could throw out on social media, but to actually think through problem-solving.

We also did something that I think in most worlds is not a novel idea, but was considered in Congress to be a novel idea. And that is we had a bipartisan planning retreat. Until I got to Congress, whenever I was part of an organization that took on a new project, usually we would start by saying, "What does success look like?" And  "Do we want to set some rules of the road?" That does not happen in Congress.

But again, working with my Republican counterparts, I said, " I think we ought to do that.  Let's actually have a bipartisan planning retreat. Let's develop some relationships together. Let's break bread together. Let's define for each member what they want to get out of their service on this committee. Let's set some rules of engagement, so that when we come to our committee, we all acknowledge that maybe we don't have all of the answers and that we engage one another through a lens of respect. And setting those ground rules at the front end — that's just good hygiene, but it seldom happens. It almost never happens in Congress.

There are other things that we did that I thought were hard, but important.  Our committee initially was given a one-year life span. Because of the success that we had, there was a push by folks off the committee to extend our committee for another year and then for another two years, for another Congress. And that two-year extension into another Congress happened on January 3rd. 2021 when we passed a rules package or January 4th, and then January 6th happened, January 6th, 2021. 

I did an individual sit-down with every member of our committee. In nine of those meetings, nine of the 11 meetings that I had, January 6th came up, usually through the lens of, "Man, I'm not sure how we're going to get anything done." And some people said, "I don't even want to be in the same room with people on this committee because I'm upset about those events, and I look at their involvement."  I still remember walking away from one of those meetings and saying to my chief of staff, "Man, we're cooked. I don't really know how we're going to do anything."

So we took a risk. We brought in an expert, an outsider to facilitate a discussion, someone with expertise in conflict resolution, to facilitate a conversation about the events of the 6th of January, where the 12 members of our committee talked through it. To my knowledge, it's the only place in Congress where Democrats and Republicans actually had a conversation about the events of January 6th.

And that was hard; it was raw. And after that conversation, I had colleagues on the committee say things like, "Well, I still disagree with what happened that day, and I still disagree with my colleagues, but that was healing for me. I'm willing to work with them." And all of this is through the lens of that initial takeaway, which is, if you want things to work differently, you need to do things differently.

Heidi: So let me ask you a question. This whole scheme sounds both obvious and brilliant to me. Why haven't all the other committees in Congress looked at what you've done and said, "We ought to work that way, too. Why hasn't this spread?"

Rep. Kilmer: Well, you know one area where the Modernization Committee made recommendations was actually suggesting this type of hygiene for other committees, that every committee should have a bipartisan planning retreat, that Congress should have a bipartisan retreat at the beginning of a Congress to say, "Okay, we agree that we're not going to  agree on everything, but let's at least start this process by saying, "Here's what we want to get done." And to develop some relationships. 

I think there are "will issues" and there are "skill issues" in Congress. The will issues are all of those things that make negotiation and compromise difficult. People being worried about a primary or gerrymandering that has made their district so blue or so red that it makes compromise politically perilous. And our campaign finance is a challenge. Those are "will issues" that  ead folks in Congress to often look at this more like a game to be won, rather than as problems to be solved.

There are also skill issues. Congress is the first place where I've ever worked where, with the exception of freshman orientation, there's really not any professional development for members to get better at their jobs. Things like: how do I negotiate strategically? How do I resolve conflict? How do I have difficult conversations with people who think differently than I do? How do I use evidence to create public policy? Those are all skills. And there are some people who, by virtue of what they'd done prior to Congress, come to Congress with those skills. And there are some people who somehow organically develop those skills within the institution of Congress. But by and large, there's a whole bunch of people here who don't have those skills. And so one of the things that the Modernization Committee recommended was actually do some skill-building as an institution and help members of Congress become better at their jobs.

Heidi: Is that one of the recommendations that is being implemented, or is that one that has not?

Rep. Kilmer: It is being implemented. And to the credit of the CAO of the —House the Chief Administrative Officer of the House, that office has, first of all, set up a staff academy to offer that professional development opportunity for staff. And they've set up an opportunity in a one-on-one manner for members of Congress to basically work with leadership experts on developing skills.

I think the next step in that process is to actually do some wholesale skill-building, — to say, "We're going to bring in an expert on conflict resolution to come for lunch three weeks in a row," or, "We're going to have folks from the Harvard Negotiation Project come in and teach us how to negotiate better." And people can choose to sign up or not sign up. I would choose to sign up for that because I want to get better at my job.

Guy: I just have a sense, and this is looking at Congress from the perspective of somebody who lives in Colorado and reads about it, but isn't really following it closely. But there's the under-the-radar part of Congress that actually may be getting things done. And there's the high-profile part that seems to dominate the inflammatory news coverage that you'll often get on the left and the right. I wondered if you could highlight things that people don't know about where Congress and related governmental efforts, I suppose, are actually working. And again, part of this is about Boulding's First Law—if we can show that things really are possible, then people might not give up so easily.

Rep. Kilmer: Yeah. It became sort of a running joke on the Modernization Committee that we would get booked for a cable news interview and almost, without exception, get canceled for the outrage of the day. So when someone would say, "Well, you're going to have an interview with this cable news network or the other," I would always say, "Do you want to bet? I bet they cancel us." And almost without exception, we got canceled. So, to some degree, that proves the point.

But there are things that I have worked on or have been a part of that don't get a lot of attention, but I think really matter.

So for example, I participate in something called the Bipartisan Working Group, which is a dozen Democrats and a dozen Republicans who meet for breakfast when we're back here. And it's a meeting in three parts. In the first part of the meeting, se go around the room and anybody who's working on something where they want to invite collaboration or co-sponsorship is able to make a pitch. In the second part of the meeting, we talk about what's going on in Congress that week or that month. And those can be feisty conversations when you're talking about taxes or immigration or healthcare or what have you.

But I'm increasingly of the belief that good democracy is a little bit like a good relationship, right? You don't necessarily agree with your partner on everything. But you've got to be able to talk to each other and listen to each other and not have every interaction turn into the Jerry Springer Show.

And then in the third part of the meeting, we talk about a big hairy issue facing the country and where we might be able to find some common ground. So for example, we brought in Trevor Potter, who was John McCain's campaign finance attorney, who had been a Republican appointee to the Federal Election Commission. And he came and spoke to us about reforms to the Federal Election Commission. He said, "I'm not going to talk to you about ending Citizens United. You're not going to find agreement on that. I'm not going to talk to you about public financing of campaigns. You're not going to come to bipartisan agreement on that either." Then he said, "But I actually think you could come to bipartisan agreement on some reforms to the Federal Election Commission." And he talked through it. And when he was done, I said, "Well, gosh, that's something I'd be willing to work on. That seems like pretty common-sense stuff." And one of my Republican colleagues said, "Yeah, I'd work with you on that." And we had two Democrats and two Republicans work for a few months. And we introduced a bill, which, when we introduced it, was the first bipartisan campaign finance reform bill in more than a decade. And so to your point about what's in the realm of the possible, we were able to find some of those areas of common ground because we took the time to do it.

Now, I don't want to mislead anybody into thinking that we were sitting around the room holding hands around the table and singing kumbaya or closing our eyes and doing trust falls into each other's arms. We stopped doing that after we dropped a guy.  But it was always the hour of each week where I found myself thinking, "We ought to be doing more of this, not just as a Congress, but as a country too."

Heidi: So how do we get more people invested in doing that?

Rep. Kilmer: Yeah. Well, some of it is actually trying to, I think, set the table for supporting that work. So I'll give you an example. A few years ago now, two things that happened in my district that were a total bummer, but that led to some positive effect. The first was, unfortunately and horrifically, a series of attacks on religious institutions in my district. The Islamic Center was burned to the ground by an arsonist. There were two Buddhist faith leaders that were assaulted outside their temple. There was a church that was vandalized, all within the span of about six weeks.

But in the spirit of something good coming out of something bad, an interfaith effort stood up, and they held a solidarity event at Tacoma Community College in my district. And the message out of that event was that part of living in a religiously and otherwise diverse pluralistic democracy is that you're going to live next to people who think and look and pray differently than you do. And that cannot come to violence and conflict.

After that event, one of the faith leaders approached me and said, "You know, that was a pretty good 90 minutes. But if we were going to do this right, we would do this in an ongoing way." Then he said, "Just out of curiosity, any federal support for something like that?" And I said, "You know, not really, at least, not currently."

A month later, I got invited to a YMCA in my district, thinking they were going to talk to me about gymnasiums losing money during the pandemic. That's not what they wanted to talk to me about. What they wanted to talk to me about was conflict. They wanted to talk to me about arguments breaking out and fights breaking out at the YMCA over politics, over the hat someone was wearing, or the shirt someone was wearing, or the cable news network someone was watching on the elliptical. And they said, "It's become so bad we've actually hired a consultant that's training our staff and training our board in conflict resolution. And we're going to host bridging events to try to get people to talk across their differences, rather than have it manifest as conflict. And this is just out of curiosity, but is there any federal support for something like that?" And I said, "not really, at least not currently."

But I looked into it. It turns out the United States actually does spend tens of millions of dollars in trying to foster social cohesion and bridging divides as a means of strengthening democracy. In other countries! It's done through the National Endowment for Democracy.

But we don't do that here in America. And so that led to the creation of a bill that I authored called the Building Civic Bridges Act, which really focuses on a few things. One, doing some grant-making to these hyper-local efforts that are trying to bridge divides. Two, training AmeriCorps members in the skills related to bridge building, in part because AmeriCorps has footprints in all of our districts. And those folks can be force multipliers in our communities if we give them the skills to help bridge divides. And third, to support colleges and universities that are doing research in that area of bridge building. When we introduced that legislation, we did so with 10 Democratic sponsors and 10 Republican sponsors. Unfortunately, the bill hasn't moved yet. But when I think about how we support the important work of bridging divides in our country, some of that is having the federal government actually value that work and step up and train people in those skills related to that work and to do some grant-making, even if it's just at a pilot level, to support some of that work—which is what the bill does.

Guy: With our Beyond Intractability project, we've been trying to build a knowledge base about what we collectively know about how to deal with all of these problems, which we post online. We're about to post a new, much upgraded version of it. But as we struggle with this, one of the sticking points that we keep coming back to is that people don't really have an agreed-upon vision of what democracy is and should be. If you talk to folks for a while, you pretty soon get the opinion or get the impression that their idea of a democracy that works is one that delivers whatever their partisan goals happen to be. And so what we've been trying to do, and I'd be very interested in any thoughts you might have on this, is to articulate a vision for democracy that is broadly applicable across the political divide. It seems that it needs to include, not just identifying points of common ground where we agree, but also constructive ways of engaging when we disagree. Now, we talk about constructive confrontation strategies, which I think is also a big part of it. Your thoughts on this would be great.

Rep. Kilmer: Well, I think one of the most important things is just to acknowledge that, as President Kennedy said, "in a democracy, we all hold office as citizens." And to paraphrase that further, the manner in which we exercise those responsibilities, to some degree, dictates what we get. And I think that's a valuable message. Tto some degree, if we want government to work in a way that is about solving problems, that is how we ought to engage one another. And if we want to see our elected officials engage with one another in a civil manner, then each of us, not just elected officials, but as citizens, engage in a civil manner. Does that answer your question?

Guy: Yes.

Heidi: Another question I have for you is that we just released a newsletter that had a title, "An election that worked and democracy that doesn't." We were very relieved that the election came off without the violence that many people were fearing. People, by and large, accept the results. There's going to be an orderly transition of power. At the same time, we're still faced with a lot of challenges. And you've implied, and we've said, that democracy is a lot more than just voting every four years. I'm wondering what you think people in all different roles, Congress, other leadership roles at the local and state levels, and ordinary citizens can do over the next four years to diminish what we call 'hyperpolarization" and to strengthen democracy.

Rep. Kilmer: One of the most interesting experiences I've had in public service did not involve legislation. It involved trying to bridge a divide in my district. And it didn't require passing a bill out of the House or having Donald Trump or Joe Biden or Barack Obama sign legislation. I grew up in a timber town that kind of took it on the chin when I was in high school. And I saw a bunch of my friends' parents lose their jobs and a bunch of my neighbors lose their jobs. And it sort of altered the trajectory of my adult life. My senior thesis in college was, "How do you help timber towns in Washington State?" And when I was in grad school at Oxford, I looked at mining towns in the UK and timber towns in Washington trying to figure out, "What do you do when the main industry that is the reason for a community's existence declines?" And then I worked in economic development professionally.

And to make a long story short, I got grumpy and ran for office. But when I ran for Congress in 2012, one of the things that sort of bummed me out was returning to my hometown and recognizing that the dialogue between the timber industry and the conservation community had not really progressed in the 20 years since I had graduated high school. It was still sort of the Hatfields and the McCoys on opposite sides of the gym.

So we took a risk. We invited folks from the environmental community and from the timber industry to be part of what we called the Olympic Forest Collaborative. And the pitch was, basically, "the status quo doesn't seem to be working for anybody. It's not working for forest health if you are a conservationist, and it's not working for economic health if you're in the timber industry. So what if we commit that we're going to try to find a smarter path forward?"

And I'll be honest with you, the first six months were generally an exercise in just trying to keep people in the room. And then we took a field trip. We actually went out into the woods. And you had folks from the conservation community say, "you know, If we could do this, we would feel a little bit better about what it meant for critters and for forest health." And you had folks from the timber industry saying like, "Well, if you could do this, rather than this, you know, the economics of it would work a lot better for us." And it was a really great day of learning.

And the next meeting we had, as the meeting kicked off, one of the leaders from one of the conservation groups said, "my organization has taken a vote, and we've decided that we want to help you guys harvest some more timber. We just want to make sure it's done in a responsible way." And we are willing to commit some of our organization's budget to hiring a forester to supplement the work of the Forest Service and to get more timber sales out the door. We just want to be at the table and make sure that it happens in a responsible way.

And I'll be honest with you, I almost fell out of my chair.  I was like, "Wow!"

And I share this because we were able to make that progress. And since then, we've had multiple timber sales move out as a consequence of the work of the collaborative. And none of it required passing a bill. None of it required the approval of the Speaker of the House or whoever's in the White House.

So what I would tell you is the hard work of bridging divides and making progress is doable. In my view, bridging divides for the sake of bridging divides is important, but bridging divides to make progress is even better, right? And bridging divides to make progress—we all get a say in that. We all can figure out, "Wow, this is the local problem that we want to work on," and it doesn't necessarily require Joe Biden or Donald Trump doing anything.

And so I don't view democracy as solely what happens in the White House or in the US Capitol Building. It's been said, and I don't know who said it, but I like it, that "democracy is the problems we solve together." And I think that's what we have to be about, right? What we need to be about is the hard work of solving problems together.

I used to say that I was a genetic optimist, that I couldn't be in this job if I wasn't an optimistic person. And then someone gave me a quote from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks that said, "There's a difference between optimism and hope." It says, "Optimism is a passive virtue. It's the belief that things will get better."  "Hope," he said," is an active virtue. It's the belief that together we can make things better. It doesn't take courage to have optimism, but it does take courage to hope."

 I like that — for a few reasons. One, I like it because it appreciates that we have a sense of agency, that we are not just observers, that we are participants. And secondly, I like that it uses the word "we," because if we are going to solve problems, we need the "we."  I'm a big believer that the boat moves best when everybody's got their ore in the water, ideally, rowing in the same direction.

Guy: Excellent. We got our start in this field in the '80s and '90s, working on the staffs of some major collaborative efforts similar to the one that you described. I was also on one (as a participant, not staff) that had to do with open space management around our town in Boulder, Colorado. And one of the things that's really troubled us over the years is that this was a really big deal in the '80s and early '90s, and then it sort of faded. And now it seems that it's a lot rarer to see this kind of stuff going on. And we start asking about what we call second-order questions. So if you have a particular solution. For instance, I think various kinds of collaborative community problem-solving efforts is really what democracy should be, or at least a big part of it. Then we ask, well, why did it fade and what could be done about that? Why aren't there more of these things? And what could conceivably be done to change that? Is it a matter of funding? Is it a matter of people just don't want to compromise because we're so hyperpolarized? Is it a matter of the demise of local news coverage so you can't find out about them so much?

Rep. Kilmer: All of that, I think. There's all sorts of interesting analysis of the decline in civic participation. The work of Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone) and others suggest that we've stopped being "joiners." So that's part of it, right? I actually do think that is part of it, that when we see ourselves as part of a collective community, we're more inclined to pick up a tool and go to work on behalf of the community. And when we see ourselves as rugged individualists, just minding our own business, we tend to focus on ourselves. A lot of good work happens when we decide we're part of a collective that we want to make better. I get to see that in my district. People doing amazing things all over my district when they say, "I'm part of a community that I want to make stronger."

Some people say to me, "God, how on earth do you go back to Congress? it's got to just be so frustrating." And I say, "You know what? The reality is what's cool about this job is I get to spend every day that I'm in my district meeting with people who are doing cool stuff and just trying to solve problems and strengthen our community." And we can lose sight of that, when we watch the outrage of the day on cable news, we get depressed. But there's actually really good work happening. And so I guess I'm more hopeful than perhaps the question suggests, because I actually do think that there's a lot of good work that's happening. And there can be more, if we encourage people to be more engaged with their civic institutions, and if we engage with our civic institutions with the lens that I think is important, which is as stewards of our institutions.

But the relative faith in institutions is at a record low. We've lost faith in higher ed as an institution of good. We've lost faith in our governmental institutions, even the polling around religious institutions is bad. You know you're in trouble when we've lost faith in faith. And yet, I keep thinking about what someone gave me when I became chair of the Modernization Committee. Someone gave me a graduation speech that John Gardner had delivered at Cornell University in 1968. He spoke about the importance of being a loving critic of an institution. He said institutions suffer from uncritical lovers who deny an institution the sort of life-giving eye toward improvements that's necessary for effectiveness. And he said, "Institutions also suffer from unloving critics who treat an institution like the pinata at the party and have an eye towards demolition, rather than towards construction.

And God knows I see a lot of that in Congress. He went on to say that institutions require stewards who are loving critics. And I think every person who is listening to us should think about that. They should think about the institutions that they are a part of and ask the question, am I sufficiently being a steward of that institution? Am I being a loving critic of that institution? And that includes America's Democratic Republic.

Heidi: I think that's really a good idea. One of the notions that we've been putting out for a long time, and it's not ours, it came from somewhere else, I don't know where. But it is that you shouldn't just tear things down or say you should get rid of something, or it's awful, without proposing an alternative. Even when Guy and I edit each other, we don't scratch something out without coming up with something different. And explaining why we made the change.  I think that's a good rule. Okay, you can say that Congress is terrible and they don't get anything done. What do you think they should do differently? We can't just go out and burn it all down and think that we're going to be able to live in the ashes. We've got to figure out how to make things better. 

The challenge, I think, is that a lot of what we call "true believers" on both sides of the divide don't seem to be really open to listening to that kind of challenge. They know they're right. They know that they want to do things they want to do. And if somebody challenges them, they're more likely to throw them out. I'm looking at the news that's saying that the Trump administration is looking to prosecute Liz Cheney who dared to question the Republicans about January 6th, and she's getting threatened with prosecution. And both sides do this, maybe not to that extent. But it takes a lot of guts to challenge the true believers. What can we do about that?

Rep. Kilmer: Well, I think I have a few perspectives on this. One is just an acknowledgment that there seems to be discontent with the status quo, that people feel like things aren't working the way they ought to. President Obama recently gave a speech where he talked about the importance of changing the math we do and moving away from subtraction and division, toward addition and multiplication. And I think that's the right math lesson. If we don't like the solution we keep getting, maybe we ought to change the math questions that we're asking. The other is a recognition that sometimes we can end up in the same place from very different perspectives. I had this lesson, and it was actually a really valuable lesson when I first started in Congress. And I'll tell you the background of it.

I had a conversation with a friend of mine who worked with a group that was trying to help figure out how to lift people out of poverty. And they were doing research with an economist who had found a few things. One, that was that poor people, by and large, didn't have savings accounts. And if they did, they weren't making deposits into the savings accounts. And this economist also found that that poor people disproportionately gambled and played the lottery. And he said, "What if we could take the excitement of gambling and playing the lottery and applied it to saving money?" And he came up with an idea that he called prize-linked savings. And the way it would work is that every time you made a deposit, you would earn a chance. And the chance would be for cash prizes. Your money would never be at risk, but rather, a financial institution could use its marketing budget to offer cash prizes. Here's what they found. It dramatically influenced savings behavior, particularly among poor people. They were far more likely to open up an account. They were far more likely to make deposits into the account.

The other thing they found was that it was illegal. Not for any particular good reason. It was just that regulators and policymakers had never contemplated anything like this. And so I was talking with this friend of mine who does this work, and I said, "Well,  I'm in a job where we can change laws. So what if we actually looked at developing legislation that would allow these prize-linked savings accounts?" And so we worked with a coalition of anti-poverty groups and with an asset building coalition. We engaged the financial institutions to develop policy that would allow for these prize linked savings accounts to be offered.

But I was a freshman in the minority, and not on the Financial Services Committee. And so we had this draft version of the bill, and I thought, "Well, I have to talk to someone on financial services." And we're looking at the roster of members on financial services on the Republican side, again, because I'm in the minority. And I said, "Well, why don't I go talk to Tom Cotton?" Because Tom Cotton  worked for the same management consulting firm that I used to work for.  He seems like a pretty sharp guy. He's ideologically very different than I am. But, I thought, why don't I go and give him a pitch?

So I go up to Tom on the floor. And my team was like, "You really want to talk to Tom Cotton? He's really conservative." And I was like, "Yeah, let's give it a shot." So I went up to Tom Cotton and I gave this pitch, and I completely nerded out on him. I told him, "here's what the data say, and there's this economist," and all this stuff. And when I finished my pitch, there were about 10 seconds where, for lack of a better description, Tom Cotton just sort of stared at me in silence.

And if anyone's ever stared at you in silence for 10 seconds, I will tell you it is either the most romantic moment of your life or the most awkward. And in this circumstance, it was both. But at the end of the 10 seconds, when Tom broke the magic, he said, "So what you're saying is you want to introduce legislation that would eliminate unnecessarily onerous financial regulations that keep financial institutions from offering an innovative product that would enable people to be more self-sufficient and less reliant on the government." To which I responded, "Sure." I mean, for me, it was about helping poor people save money. But for him, it was about eliminating unnecessarily onerous financial regulations that keep financial institutions from offering innovative products that would make people more self-sufficient and less reliant on the government. And it was the Kilmer-Cotton bill in the House. It was Senator Moran from Kansas, a Republican, and Senator Sherrod Brown and Elizabeth Warren, two progressive Democrats, in the Senate. It passed the House; it passed the Senate, and it was signed by the President. And now there are thousands of people around the country, tens of thousands of people around the country who have prize-linked savings accounts, most of whom had never had a savings account before.

So  one of my takeaways from that is you can have very different perspectives, but if you are willing to have the conversation, maybe you can end up in the same place. And that part of leadership and part of citizenship is trying to find those shaded areas of the Venn diagram so that we can at least move forward on the issues on which we agree.

Heidi: And to restate the obvious, a key is being willing to talk to somebody who you are sure is going to be opposed to you and being willing to listen to somebody who you are sure is going to be opposed to you, because lo and behold, you might be wrong.

Rep. Kilmer It also implies framing a proposal in a way that's genuinely beneficial across the board, a good common sense kind of thing.

Guy: And it's stories like this, the line that Debbie Kolb had for a book that she wrote years ago, "When Talk Works," I think applies.

Rep. Kilmer: There are so many benefits to actually just being willing to talk with people who might think differently than you. And it's hard, right? It's hard in an environment where either, by choice ,or by just reality, it can be challenging to find people who think differently than you do. You can listen to a cable news channel that only affirms your worldview. The feed into your social media can only affirm your worldview. Your neighbors, as we sort geographically, may only affirm your worldview. And so it can take effort to have that type of dialogue. But I think, again, to me, a healthy Democratic republic requires it. And it requires going into those conversations with the recognition that we may not be right about everything. That's the message I tried to share with my 15-year-old and my 18-year-old. And I think it's probably the path forward. If we want to have some different outcomes, maybe it's time we do some things differently.

Heidi: Well, we sort of came full circle there. I think that's a wonderful place to end. But I want to give you the last question that I always give people, which is, "is there anything I haven't asked that you wished I would have asked? Is there one message that you want to impart to our viewers about better ways of engaging, depolarizing, making our country and our world healthier?"

Rep. Kilmer: Well, I'll just say this. I really appreciate you asking the questions that you've asked. And to your credit, you know oftentimes, these stories don't get told.  I really like the author Amanda Ripley, not just because she gave coverage to our committee, but because she wrote a book about people working their way out of conflict. Because it can seem hopeless if you don't recognize that sometimes we can actually work our way out of conflict.

And so  I really appreciate the two of you for being willing to visit with me, and , talk about some of the ways we've been able to work through conflict in Congress, even in an institution like Congress, where it can seem hopeless. Without much attention, Lord knows from cable news, we've been able to find some common ground and find some wins. So thank you for being willing to chat with me about it.

Heidi: Oh, well, the thanks go the other way! Our mission is to try to help people understand that there are better ways. And if they understand there are better ways, that gives us hope that we can fix things. And then we work harder. And it's positive feedback system that is going the right way, as opposed to the wrong way. So thank you very much. Thank you for your service in Congress.  I was devastated when I heard you were going to leave, but I hope that you will go on and do equally exciting and important things at Rockefeller, which is where, I gather, you are going next.

Rep. Kilmer: That's where I'm headed. Thanks so much. Appreciate you both.

Heidi: Thank you!