Merrick: Welcome, everyone. Welcome Ashok, Guy, and Heidi to our conversation today, Monday, November 4th, just before the election, of all things. We'll talk about that relevance in a moment. What is the spirit and focus of today's conversation? It is called A Reasonable Peace: Can Critical Thinking, Save the Field of Peacebuilding.

Let me just offer a two-minute frame, and I'll turn it then to Guy, Heidi and Ashok to introduce themselves into the conversation. We're really asking ourselves the broad frame question, whether a timely conversation about whether nonviolence, pacifism, or moral opposition to war and suffering is enough to create peace today? Or, do we need a whole radically different approach to peace? We know that peacebuilding and conflict resolution have focused on bridging differences, finding ways for groups to coexist despite differences. But there's been an assumption embedded in that, the assumption that all parties to conflict have interests that can be met by one another through negotiation. Since after World War II, the US-led liberal world order had established a rules-based framework for addressing international conflicts. We'll hear probably about that as we proceed today in a moment. But if these are not working, as appears to be the case, as our speakers today will expound on, then what else is possible? In other words, is there a role for a radical realism about this context?

I am Merrick. I facilitate conversations like this globally. No more details needed by me other than the fact that it is a great pleasure for me to host this event and this Socratic conversation where we have a set of framing queries, but we're also inviting Heidi, Guy and Ashok to ask each other questions around this topic of A Reasonable Peace and the intersection of these topics with critical thinking and whether or not these pieces can thread and/or coexist.

My job is to ensure there is clarity and focus to the conversation, that Ashok, Guy and Heidi are responsive to one another in their thoughts and queries, that we try and clarify the respective points, so we speak to one another versus perhaps past one another, and to make sure we actually move through this conversation in a way that feels balanced and clear for all. And then finally, I will not be taking a perspective in this conversation, but rather serving to enhance it where I can. That is it. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Guy, Heidi, and Ashok. Let me start in that order. Guy, if I could ask you to introduce yourself first, then Heidi, then Ashok, and we will begin. Thank you.

Guy:  I'm Guy Burgess. I've been working with Heidi here jointly on something called the Beyond Intractability Project for pretty much our whole career, but certainly the last 30 years. And what we've been trying to do with Beyond Intractability, which was for years and years at the University of Colorado, since we retired, we've made it independent. We're actually working harder on it now that we don't have university commitments anymore.

I have a couple of ways to explain how we came to focus on this. Years ago, in the late '80s, we got a big grant from the Hewlett Foundation to help set up one of their university-based conflict resolution theory centers. And about that time, the Society for Professionals in Dispute Resolution, which was the predecessor of what's now the Association for Conflict Resolution, came out with a series of guidelines on how to think about public policy dispute resolution. And half the pamphlet was devoted to how to identify intractable conflicts that you really ought to stay away from because they blow up in your face. And we said, "you know somebody really ought to build a program that focuses on these intractable problems and how best to address them."

The other thing about the early days of the program is it was funded by the Hewlett Foundation. And this was at a time when we were exchanging information with floppy disks by the mail.  And we also started thinking about how we can make use of these rapidly advancing computer technologies to better spread information on this topic and to speed the learning curve.

So we've spent the last, what's now, what, 35 years, trying to build an online knowledge base that gets ever more sophisticated and ever more complete and involves contributions from hundreds of people focusing on this question of how can we more constructively deal with intractable conflict?

Merrick: Terrific. Thank you so much, Guy. And let me turn to Heidi to add a bit of introduction of her own, please.

Heidi. Well, I'm the other half and everything he said I am part of and agree with. What I might add is that the early days, we were organized by working groups. And we had a working group on what we called international conflict. And we had a working group on race relations, which was looking primarily at the United States.  And we had an environmental working group because those were the three areas that people were interested in. And Guy and I were the only people who were going to the meetings of all three working groups. And it struck us right away that we're talking about the same thing in all of these meetings. These aren't three different areas. They're the same area. And the thing that brings it together is that these are all intractable types of conflicts.  So that was part of where we started focusing in on intractability.

And because we had, at the time, a lot of people who were interested in international conflict, and we were too, we weren't looking that much at the United States except in terms of race, relations, and environmental conflicts, not more broadly. And there was a distinction that not only we made, but most of our colleagues made at the time, between peacebuilding and conflict resolution. Peacebuilding was done abroad. Conflict resolution was done in the United States. The scholars were different. The practitioners were different. The theories were different. It was two tracks. And over the years, we began to realize, really, they are very similar tracks. They should be working much more hand-in-hand. We need all the skills of peacebuilders here in the United States. Abroad, they need the skills of conflict resolvers.

So that two tracks was not particularly helpful. So we've been trying to bring that together. And for the last eight or so years, we really have been focusing a lot more on the United States because we feel like the United States needs a lot of help.

Merrick: Certainly does. We will get into that very briefly. Thank you both, Heidi and Guy. And Ashok, could you introduce yourself briefly as well, both your background, but also your interest in today's conversation?

Ashok: Thanks. I'm so excited that we finally got this conversation going. I think, because unlike Heidi and Guy, I've had a very splintered and fragmented series of careers. So I'm going to just try and put it together in the most succinct way. I have been teaching people how to think since 1988. And I started by teaching people creative thinking, and then I branched into critical thinking. So that's from  '88 to '94. And then when I came to the US, I got interested in diversity and cross-cultural management, which led me to mediation and conflict resolution. I worked for many years in the greater Boston area with community mediation groups, and for a short period of time with an international consulting company, again in Boston. Then I went to India to start my own company, a conflict management and peacebuilding company called Metaculture. I did that from 2005 until late 2016.

And particularly in the last few years there, my entire perspective about conflict and peace changed. I won't go into the many reasons, but I became very interested in international conflict as well as what Merrick mentioned earlier, the international world order, and how that was being challenged across the globe, particularly in the global south, as they call it.

For a long time, I struggled to integrate the idea of critical thinking into peacebuilding, particularly at conferences with my peers, because I found people not responding well to the idea of rigorous critical thinking.  It struck me, and I'm happy to be challenged by any of you here, it struck me that this field had evolved into a set of axioms that were treated as dogma. And as democracy started weakening, as the world became more embroiled in conflict, I realized that peacebuilders across the world were completely helpless.

But instead of radically rethinking their approaches, they were digging deeper to do more of primarily the same — with minor tweaks. This is why I invited Guy and Heidi to this conversation. And I thought Merrick would be the right person to facilitate this because I don't have the answers in terms of how to revive or make peacebuilding more relevant in this new world.  Because given my work in democracy, I'm quite certain that liberal world order is going to get completely trashed very soon. So what does that mean for peacebuilding? And, is it possible that we can seriously rethink peacebuilding in the context of what I call geopolitical realities.

Merrick: Ashok, thank you.  Let me just hold that baton here and then pass it to Guy and Heidi. And let me just give you a little tighter frame on this from this introduction to, perhaps, our first query. And I think a little bit of going back to sort of the original motivations and premise for peacebuilding and conflict resolution matters to do so for a moment here because it's our basis of reconsideration.  And here what I am asking is when we think about those original motivations for peacebuilding and/or conflict resolution, as you said, Heidi, sort of those two lanes, in fact, being often deeply separated. The query really is, is it creating peace, nonviolence, pacifism, coexistence, societal or global harmony, or something else that we're talking about?  What are we really talking about in these spaces of peacebuilding and conflict resolution? And do we need to revisit it, based on your reflections, based on your work and intractable conflict, Guy and Heidi? What is your penchant for whether and how we need to fully revisit our approach to this field? What are your thoughts?

Guy: Well, I might start by focusing on vision. It is hard to get somewhere if you don't know where you're going. And one of the things that has gotten lost, I think, in recent years, is we have a much less clear consensus about what a peaceful democratic society looks like or, if we have peace, what does it look like? And so I think the first set of things to focus on is different ways in which societies and cultures might choose to organize themselves.

Throughout most of human history, societies have been organized around a power-over approach. There's actually a great Carl Sandberg poem that  illustrates this, I think, very well. And it's basically two guys that meet, maybe across the fence. And one guy says,

I want your land. The other guy says,

Can't have it.

Where'd you get it?

I got it from my father.

Well, where'd he get it?

He got it from his father.

Ok, where did he get it?

He got it from his father.

Where did he get?

He fought for it.

Well, I'll fight you for it.

We talk about "I'll fight you for it rules." And that's a way of organizing society that inevitably leads either to total anarchy and chaos as different aspiring authoritarians duke it out, or it leads to brutal authoritarianism that gets entrenched with state police.  And in the new era of 21st century technology, a kind of mind control that George Orwell didn't even have nightmares about.

And the alternative, and we have been trying as a species, really, for centuries now, to try to figure out how to escape that trap. And democracy is what we keep coming up with. It's basically an attempt to replace power-over forms of social organization, with power-with forms of social organization. And there are real questions as to whether it will turn out to be strongest in the long run.

But it has, historically, been vastly more productive. And the reason is that it rewards individual incentives.  It is a way of organizing a society around the notion that for every problem, there's an opportunity for somebody who can find a solution to that problem. And that's the engine of social progress. And that's democracy's big advantage, even though there's lots of infighting and chaos.

But what we're talking about now and struggling with is can we make power-with democracy work?  And I think you know as Ashok taught us in earlier conversations, it's a lot easier in some cultural circumstances than others. And that there are real questions about  how power-with societies interact with power-over societies. And that's the geopolitical struggle of the moment, which has broken out into war in two major places. It could get a lot worse fast.

Merrick: Thank you. Much appreciated, Guy. Heidi, just on the thread of the disconnect, whether you want to pick up that thread right there and, in particular, sort of diving deeper into the motivation or premise of peacebuilding or conflict resolution, how would you unpack it before I turn to Ashok?

Heidi: Well, I do want to unpack it.  But before I do that, I just want to say one thing in response to what Guy said, which is now we are seeing a lot of mistrust with the power-with model in the United States and Western Europe. So it's not just a fight between the stable power -with societies versus the either stable or unstable power- over societies.  We're having our own internal struggles as to whether we're going to be able to maintain the power-with society that we have had, or whether we're going to go to  a power-over model ourselves. Okay. That's what I want to say to him.

Going back to your question. Historically, the conflict resolution field started in the, I think, '20s or '30s. I'm not sure I've got my dates right in the United States anyway.  It started with labor management struggles. Labor management relations really hit bottom. And there were a lot of strikes and there was a lot of violence and a lot of bloodshed. And people looked at that and said, "We've got to come up with a different way." And there was the National Labor Relations Act, and the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service was formed.  And they developed the field of conflict resolution to mediate labor- management disputes and make them manageable. So that's really where that started. And then people noticed that this mediation stuff actually works pretty well, and they started to apply it in other areas as well.

A little bit later, we got World War II. And during World War II, and afterwards, there were some leading scholars, both in Europe and the United States, who said, "My God, this just can't happen anymore. We've got to come up with another way [these were academics].  We have to come up with ways of preventing terrible wars like this from happening." And that's where the peace studies field started. And peace activism. I'm sure there were peace activists before that, but it really got rolling in the late '40s, '50s after World War II. And that's when you had the likes of Kenneth Boulding, who Guy was lucky enough to work with for years. And Johan Galtung, and Anatol Rappaport were other early leaders of that field. 

Guy: And Gene Sharp.

Heidi: Yes, and Gene Sharp, yeah. Well, that's another interesting division, because there was long a division between the nonviolence folks who Gene Sharp represents, was a leader of, and the conflict resolution folks. I would put really put the fields in a three a three-directional diagram — maybe a triangle's better— you've got conflict resolution, you've got nonviolence, and you've got peace-building.

Or maybe it's best as a Venn diagram. They all overlap. They're all going different directions. The scholars were different. The practitioners were different. The techniques were different. But there's enough overlap that we could all learn from each other. And what's surprising is we all fought with each other. And you'd think people in this field would know better than that.  But anyway, I see the two parallel things or three parallel things, but they're all converging. And they need to converge.

Merrick: Heidi, thank you. I think we have unpacked between yourself and Guy, what I would call the motivations and premises fairly well, both the disconnects and the overlaps as they may be. But I want to invite Ashok  not just to respond to that, but perhaps take us further, Ashok, into a connected thread, which is if that is where things came from, so to speak, right, this Venn diagram, then where does it lead us today in whether you see a connection or a disconnection between the field of peacebuilding and, frankly, the other pieces of the puzzle as well, nonviolent engagement, conflict resolution, and where we are today, state of world, ground conditions 2024. If you can thread to that query, Ashok, that would be terrific. Tell us how you see it.

Ashok: Absolutely. In fact, Guy and Heidi, you've done such a fantastic job of laying the context historically. So I don't want to go there. I particularly like the Venn diagram imagery between nonviolence, peacebuilding, and conflict resolution. Really, it explains so much.

Because I'm not a scholar like you and I came into this field a little later, I will start with growing up in India. Now, I know for the Westerners, particularly those Westerners who are interested in peacebuilding, India is the land of Gandhi and nonviolence. And I don't want to dismiss that. There is a lot there.

Having said that, growing up in India, I never experienced, even once, any attempt in either public life or in the civic space, any kind of mediative processes. And I was in India till the age of 36. What I found in India was very different. This is one of the reasons why, when I came to the US and discovered conflict resolution, I was bowled over. The idea that you would even negotiate with someone in India was bizarre! Because negotiation was for those who didn't have the capacity to have their way.

In other words, whether it's business, whether it's a street brawl, whether it's in the family, negotiation, forget dialogue. Negotiation never came into play. It only came into play when both the parties had relatively equal power, and somehow good sense prevailed, probably through an outsider. And there was an attempt at negotiation. And of course, even when there was supposedly a negotiation taking place, it was really bargaining. The reason I say this is the only model that I experienced was power-over — consistently amongst classmates, in school, in college, in pretty much everywhere in India.

When I came to the US and I was exposed to mediation and conflict resolution, it was like, "Oh my God, this is so evolved. This is really what Gandhi was trying to do, except that his nonviolence was through sheer force of moral authority. It wasn't persuasion. And it definitely was not negotiation. In fact, Gandi was not,given what I have read about the Indian independence movement, very open to what we toda call negotiation. Very often, when Nehru and the others came to negotiate with Gandhi, I'm not sure a lot of negotiation happened.

So where am I going with this?  When I look at what I call the Western model of peacebuilding and conflict resolution, it is really based on, not just an enormous interest in a negotiated settlement.  But also, it's based on a whole host of assumptions, including the reasonableness of the other person. And all of this was, as I said, for me, it was very attractive.

But at the same time, when I looked at the world outside of my mediation, conflict resolution circles, even while I was doing this in Boston, I saw a very different world.  And particularly after my experience in India from '95 to 2000 no, 2005 to 2016, 2017, when I ran Metaculture, I realized that even civil society was not even remotely interested in negotiation or dialogue.

And then, of course, the last 10 years with the Syrian crisis, Brexit, Trump in the US, Ukraine, and Palestine, it's become clear to me that the world that was being very meticulously crafted by Western mediators and peacebuilders was unique to their own sensibilities. 

And I took a long time to get here, but I'm getting to the primary question that you asked, Merrick, about the disconnect. The disconnect is this is a very particular sensibility, the sensibility that we can reason, and the sensibility that we want peace. Even the idea that we have a responsibility to get along with people who are different. That is a very particular sensibility. And I would almost call that sensibility the "cosmopolitan, Western, liberal sensibility."

I say cosmopolitan, Western, liberal because this is the elite. It is the highly educated, the people who Heidi talked about looking back on World War II and saying, "Oh, my God, this can never happen again. We have to create systems that can ensure that we don't end up with this kind of bloodshed." The disconnect is that has almost nothing to do with the way the rest of the world looks at power.

I really liked Guy's poem about the two neighbors. And of course, it's so crude. Of course, it's almost primitive. But if we look at the world today, including Israel and Palestine, it's that mindset that informs relationships. So one of the things I'm hoping will come out of this conversation is considering whether  these assumptions of wanting peace over war are valid.  I mean, it seems self-evident to many of us. Violence is bad. If you can have peace, why would you have war? Or if you can have power-with rather than power-over, why would you have power-over? I think these are (if not) culturally rooted assumptions.  I think these are historically unique assumptions that somehow don't necessarily work, unless the other party shares those assumptions.

Merrick: Thank you, Guy. Heidi, before I turn to you, I just want to flag this is our Socratic moment here, both to reflect on what you've just heard from Ashok. I'm just curious about, not necessarily if you agree with it, but what are you hearing in terms of these fundamental assumptions that he has clarified as part of the origins of the Dispute Revolution and Peacebuilding field and the challenge that, in fact, those premises don't hold in other parts of the world? Obviously, in your own upbringing, Ashok, but far, far beyond that, and what this all means for the day. So what are you hearing, Heidi or Guy. Perhaps Heidi first this time. I'm curious. What are you hearing? And what do you want to understand better from Ashok's point of view?

Heidi: What I'm hearing is that there are two mindsets.  I hesitate to make it dichotomous, but I heard it as dichotomous, two mindsets. And to use Guy's terminology, there's a power-over mindset where people want to get as much as they can get. They fight for it. They want to exert their power-over other people and get as much as they can. And then there's the other mindset of working with other people, getting along, negotiating, trying to coexist with everybody. And what I hear Ashok saying, and I think he's right, is that Western liberal society has long assumed that the power-with scenario was better and that the whole world should follow it and will eventually follow it. This was the notion of  "the end of history."

And the rest of the world saying, "I don't think so!" And I think that distinction is absolutely correct. And the only question that I'd have for Ashok, which is the one I think we're going to be getting into anyway, is given that we all agree that there are these two mindsets and most of the world follows the power over mindset, where do you see this going?

Merrick: Thank you. So Guy, should we adopt that dichotomy for the moment? If if we do, we have these two mindsets, so what? So what if we accept that reality?  Guy, I want to hear you expound a bit here, whether in that same line or a different one. What are you hearing? What do we need to unpack?

Guy: Well, I think that there's an important distinction to be made between two aspects of social life. There is the social, political, and cultural questions about status, about whose values, how we're going to live, all that sort of thing. And then there are economic questions. And on the one hand, we really haven't got this consensus of how to deal with all the social and cultural issues. Because fundamentally, what you have to do is come up with a coexistence strategy where lots of people can live very different ways from one another but still manage to coexist in peace and mutually cooperate.

Heidi: That's the liberal view.

Guy: But there's also another counterpoint to this, which is economics. And the global economy. When I was in graduate school before computers could make graphs, I did it by hand.  And I plotted when there got to be 3 billion people on the planet. Now there is well over seven. In the 1970s, that was considered absolutely, positively impossible, that there would be widespread calamity, famine. The society would overshoot and collapse. But it didn't.

And the reason was that we learned how to work together at an astonishing level.  If you look at the global logistics chain that delivers to our grocery store or Amazon at our beck and call. Anything that we want. And it's always there. It's always fresh. You have blueberries every day. If they have to come from New Zealand, they come from New Zealand. And the engine that did this is global.  Many parts of the the Global South have had phenomenal success. The rate of poverty in pretty much every part of the world, except the left-behind-class, the Trump supporters in the developed world, has been doing phenomenally well—more than anybody ever dared hope for. And somehow that global economic system that made that possible. And if we lose it, we're all going to starve to death, because the global population is supported by the efficiencies of that system. But,  if things are as bad as we paint them on the social side, how can they be as good as they are on the economic side?

Merrick: Fascinating. Thank you so much for that, Guy. In this tension between the coexistence query, right, and what holds us all together here.  And there's an aspect of collaborative effort, whether based in economics or otherwise, that has made that possible. And I wonder, Ashok, if you want to build on this a little bit, the question mark becomes, if things are in this sort of two mindset space, with versus over, and we need to rethink how we navigate in this current global context. It is working to bring our blueberries to the table, even though we are deeply divided, to borrow Guy's phrase here. So what? What do we need to add to this puzzle in order to navigate forward with a more, perhaps, thoughtful and reflective approach? What are your thoughts?

Ashok: My thoughts are very muddled. I'll tell you why. Because I think Guy is absolutely right. On one end, politically and socially, there's almost chaos. Globally, that is. And also in many countries.  But then economically, as Guy says, the system is working. This raises a couple of questions. One, why is it working, as opposed to in the political or social arena? 

To begin with, I would say this is the result of the post-1945 liberal democratic, capitalist free market world that was put into place by the Western powers. So what we are seeing in terms of logistics, for instance, the blueberries, is because, while it was rather slow in terms of picking up in the '50s and '60s, by the '90s, we really managed to create a global market. And as we all know, that isn't really sustainable. China has been, for many years, dumping stuff on the rest of the world. And Trump first and now Biden, and whoever the next president is, is going to put the brakes on it. So even this masterful global economic supply chain is going to slow down.  It's almost inevitable. So that's one. But it has lasted longer than the sociopolitical world that was put in place.

So now I want to go to Heidi's question. Where do we go from this? Of course, there's always a possibility, because none of us is a soothsayer or a prophet, it's very possible that something will happen in the next 5 to 10 years and things will settle back and the liberal world order will be saved.  People like me would be delighted with that, because the current state of the world terrifies many of us. But let's just assume that it will not recover or revive as easily. Then what do we do? And I'm just throwing it out here for discussion in the spirit of brainstorming — the approach that I think will be most useful.

Let's just take the US and Western nations. And I'm not talking of peacebuilders at all. We are almost irrelevant in the larger picture. But if the states, UK, France, Germany, US decide that they see value in maintaining the liberal world order and conflict resolution and peacebuilding and the whole package, they may have to create a separate zone within which these processes can work.

So it's kind of like a company decides to set up a mediation process internally. The equivalent of the EU or NATO. but encompassing North America. I see that it's almost like going back to the Cold War era. I don't see the Russian, Chinese, Arab states being part of that at all. Don't get me wrong. I do believe that there will be negotiation and bargaining and game playing between these two blocks. But I see that the only possible way for us to salvage any of what we are talking about lies in creating a very strong fence, literally ring fencing these societies so that, at least internally, domestically, they can continue to work under these assumptions of coexistence, of managing and accepting differences.

Now, what does that mean? How would you do that, when the threat from outside actors, authoritarian actors, is so strong? And this is where and this is something that my peacebuilding peers detest. And I say, "This is where Kissinger's realpolitik is so important." In a way, the West, and I don't know how many countries of the West will come together.  We don't even know what will happen to many of the Eastern or Central European nations in the next 10 to 20 years. But whatever is left of the West will have to be so strong militarily that it can fend off, it can deter, any untoward attentions from the rest of the world. This might require war with, for instance, Iran, okay, in order to protect Western democracy and Western coexistence or coexistence between Western nations. It's not a happy situation.

I think what it tells me, and I'll stop with this, is that the idea of global peace is a non-starter. The globe is not run by America. Most of the globe in population terms doesn't give a damn for Western assumptions. Putin, Xi, India's Modi, they are very clear. This is ridiculous. You guys have been bullying us for way too long. We don't need it. We have our own ways of doing things. And I feel weird as an Indian who spent most of his life in India, and I'm now in the US, wanting desperately to be part of any society that values peaceful coexistence, that values dialogue, that values reason and critical thinking. And here I am, in a way, almost talking against the part of the world that is mine. So I feel this is why I said I feel very muddled, because cognitively, I know what I want, and I know the kind of world I want to live in. But does that mean that I literally have to kiss goodbye to my roots in order to do that?

Merrick: Ashok, thank you. Let me turn to you both, Guy and Heidi in a moment. But let me just remind you all that what we are hearing from you, Ashok, even though you say it's muddled, you shared, in fact, a series of critical thinking reflections about the context that we are struggling with. And that indeed was the title of this talk, which was whether or not there is a role of reason and critical thinking, higher order capability, if you will, in the context of this space of peacebuilding and conflict resolution and coexistence writ large. And so that very element, by the way, we have not defined well enough. And I think for our listeners, we need to define what we mean by these critical thinking skills. But more broadly, what role does that have in this field space? That is to Guy and to Heidi, what is the role of critical thinking, these higher-order reflections in the peacebuilding context, given that apparently by the evidence, that peacebuilding work is largely not rising to the occasion in our current global context. Guy, Heidi, over to you.

Guy: Well, I might start by first observing that critical thinking that I think we're talking about here, and that I certainly plan to talk about in a moment, is not the kind of "critical theory" that underlies the great diversity, equity, and inclusion debate, which is too much focused on criticizing the existing world order and not paying enough attention to the value of that order. And likewise, paying attention to the problems faced by disempowered folks of one sort or another, but not enough attention to what role they have in that. But I think the more important thing is that we've just got to think through this problem. We've never really built a neoliberal society that really quite worked. Democracy sort of works if you have a strong hierarchy and it's culturally homogeneous, and the people who are disempowered don't complain too much. That was the kind of democracy and democratic capitalist system that produced the revolution of the last several centuries that now supports seven billion people. But it isn't good enough to deal with today's world, which is vastly more complex. Our globalized economy has brought lots and lots of very different people with very different cultures and values together in an even more competitive situation. So we've got to figure out how to make that work. And that's where applying the smartest thinking we can possibly muster to peacebuilding is going to be essential. This is taking the concept of peacebuilding quite broadly.

And I think it's in the work that we've been doing on Beyond Intractability and something we call "massively parallel peacebuilding," which is a strategy for doing this. We focus on three broad areas in which we've really got to figure stuff out. One is just managing the difficulty of getting an awful lot of people in an awful lot of rooms and negotiating mutually beneficial ways of dealing with very difficult problems. Just the sheer mechanics of doing that is very hard.

Then there's the complexity problem. The way that I try to explain this is imagine society as a giant pool table with a gadzillion balls on it. And the way we tend to think about problem-solving is one actor who's lining up the perfect pool shot that will hit all of these zillions of balls and get them all to go in just the right places at the right time.  The problem is that the way the social system works is you've got a gadzillion actors all at the same time trying to take the same shot. And that produces pure chaos. So you can't have this kind of comprehensive plan. Instead, what you have is a lot of people trying to do the right thing. This is what we call massively parallel. They're independent actors. And they're trying to focus on one aspect of the problem. Nobody's smart enough to deal with very many. They're trying to harness this engine that problems create opportunities, and they're trying to take advantage of those opportunities.

And the last big piece of this is that we've got to deal with what we call bad faith actors, folks that aren't participating in this system in good faith. They want to make power over work, and they want to be the guys in power. And there are all sorts of nasty ways they play that game from the interpersonal level to the geopolitical level. And there are new technologies that empower these folks that are emerging at a stunning rate. And we've got to really be on top of them all. And this isn't just military. It's what, at least in one project we were involved in, is called hybrid warfare. There's a constant war going on, and the number of arenas that this is going on is just mind-blowing. But each one of them creates an opportunity. We have a colleague who is a security bigwig for IBM, and she shared her matrix of all of the threats that IBM sees as challenging their computers. And it's 50, 60, 70 major different kinds of things. So dealing with the bad faith actor problem, the high-tech propaganda problem, all this stuff is a huge deal.

But,  if we break it up into enough pieces, there are opportunities for people to work on each part of it. And that's how you get out of this, or at least struggle through it, muddle through it.

Merrick: Yes, yes. Perhaps muddling is the operative word.  Heidi, I'm coming to you in a second, but you know the mechanics, the complexity, the management of bad faith actors, if only the quality of our thinking could help us to break apart these problems and to muddle our way through them, we could make progress. I'm just curious if, A, do you align with that? And B, if not, what else would you add or redirect to that narrative, Heidi?

Heidi: Yes, I pretty much align with it, but I was thinking along different lines because we usually do. And going back to something Ashok said earlier, that the peacebuilding field and proponents of liberal democracy have a certain set of assumptions, dogmas, I think you said, that we don't question. That we just assume that the image that we have, our worldview, is right, and is best, and will work. And we just keep on marching forward no matter what comes at us, we just keep going. And I think it's very clear that we need to revisit our assumptions. But I don't think that we can just do that in terms of rational cost-benefit analysis. Because the human brain, much as we would like to think it, is not a rational machine. We are a big bag of boiling emotions. And when emotions come into conflict in our own head with reason, the psychologists have taught us that emotions are going to win every time. So one of the Bibles of the conflict resolution field for years was the book Getting to Yes and that took a very rational approach, cost-benefit analysis to coming to agreement. And the book's kind of been denounced by scholars in years since. But in reality, most of our colleagues are still following those steps. We can say we don't like it, but we do it. And it's fine if everybody's working with the same assumptions and isn't too emotionally involved. As soon as you get people who are really emotionally involved, when the conflict's important, when they have skin in the game, when they really care emotionally,  Getting to Yes doesn't work.

And critical thinking, if it means rational thinking, also doesn't work. We've got to somehow or other deal with the emotions as well.

Merrick: Very, very interesting. This is getting juicy, for sure. Ashok, I'm turning to you, but I want to try and frame this up for you to grab. And then you can reject and go for another query if you wish. But a couple of threads here. If we're trying to take a massively parallel dispute resolution mindset to deal with the mechanics, the complexity, the bad actors, and in fact, if the quality of our thinking was better, we probably could make some progress in this space. And I forgive me, Guy, for oversimplifying your point. I'm sure I am. And yet, the issue here is that we, in fact, are working with dogmas, dogmas of what I call the legacy of essentially the fundamental belief systems, values, perhaps even the emotions, that those in our field, those who have, essentially led our field, used to frame our approach to dispute resolution and peacebuilding. And Ashok, your argument here, or at least part of it, again, not to oversimplify that, is "wait a second, you know we need to thread in a better quality of critical high-order thinking, if only we could." And Heidi is saying, "not so fast, the complexity of human emotion, that emotion takes precedent over rational thinking 9 times out of 10, perhaps. So what do we do with that, Ashok? If you are saying if only we could cultivate and, as you said, teach a better form of critical thinking and embed or thread that with our peacebuilding field writ large, things would be more navigable. A, do you agree with that? B, expound.

Ashok: I'm going to take a step back. Thank you, Merrick. I think this is fantastic because what I'm hearing in the first 45 minutes, 50 minutes of this conversation has told me that we have started this conversation without defining critical thinking. And I'm going to just try to explain how I, and at least some of my colleagues in the critical thinking world, understand critical thinking, because there are many misconceptions about it.

Let me start with a little anecdote, which was mind-blowing for me. Ever since I came back to the US in 2017, I have been, by virtue of being in DC, I was in touch with many of the very large peacebuilding organizations, international organizations. And I was in touch with the CEOs. And all these people, in the beginning, were very receptive to me because you know what?  Brown guy coming from India, let's hear him out. Until they realized that I wasn't going to play ball with them. But I tried, particularly in 2018, '19, and '20, very hard to engage with the peacebuilding community in DC about introducing critical thinking to these processes. And I was actually brushed off. And there were two ways in which I was brushed off. The first one was, "Oh, we have a fantastic process. It's all taken care of." The second was, "Oh, of course, critical thinking." A CEO of one of these fields told me, "I'm a lawyer. Of course, I know critical thinking." And I say this because critical thinking is not, and now I'll define it. It has nothing to do with critical theory, critical race theory, any of that. As Guy said, all of that is about critiquing the system.

Critical thinking is probably badly named. But all it means, and again, it is not just about cold clinical reason. The term critical thinking and one of the founders of the field, Richard Paul, he's no more, but from the '60s onwards, he was very clear. And you know the way I practice it, it is, to use an old-fashioned term from the '60s, it is holistic thinking. It doesn't in any way negate the role of emotions. On the other hand, emotions are seen, just like a lot of people understand, psychologists, etc., as information-bearing nuggets that give us insights into the world.

There are about two to three key aspects to critical thinking. The best way of defining it, it's not adequate, but it's interesting, is thinking about your thinking while you're thinking. In other words, it's about metacognition. Metacognition is the capacity to watch your own thinking as you are thinking.

Now, when I teach people, one of the not first things, one of the fifth or sixth things I have to teach people, is how do you observe your own thinking while you are in the process of thinking? While you are trying to problem-solve or analyze? You're not merely grappling with the content or the subject matter. You're also conscious of your thinking process. When you are conscious of your thinking process, you are also paying attention to the triggers, the emotions, the biases, the prejudices, the assumptions. You are literally mapping your mind and like a complex relationship map, you are mapping everything that's happening in your brain.

Now, as part of the critical thinking process, like in any analysis or in the scientific process, there's information gathering, there's information selection, there's analysis, there's synthesis, all of that.  But it is much broader than the traditional scientific process, which is what we normally think of when we say reasoned thinking.

So why do I say critical thinking is so important here? Again, mind you, I haven't done the hard work of really figuring out how we can integrate what I consider to be critical thinking into peacebuilding processes.  And that's why this conversation is so interesting. And for me, this is brainstorming because I don't have the answers yet. But I suspect that just as peacebuilding and conflict resolution have become dogmatic, we have become very invested in these processes and theories and assumptions. And the world has shown us that that isn't going to work. Whether it is Trump, whether it is Vance, whether it is Xi or Orban, they are telling us very clearly, the way you folks are doing business isn't cutting it for us. That's phenomenal information. That information forces us, (now I'm taking on the role as a peacebuilder) if I'm interested in, let's say, the Palestine-Israeli conflict, as a peacebuilder, I have to seriously understand the limitations of my own favorite theories and processes, because they are not working in action. Then I have to understand, if I'm a third party, I have to really understand the Israelis. I have to understand the Palestinians. Then I have to understand Iran. In doing this, I not only have to understand the ground realities and the incentives that Hezbollah or Hamas has, I have to understand the incentives that Netanyahu has to perpetuate the conflict. I have to also understand China's role in this, Russia's role in this, America's interests. That complex holistic understanding is literally the only way as a peacebuilder, I can even presume to walk in there with a suggestion. And I don't say resolution of any kind. I'm not even talking about negotiating or mediating between the groups. But if I walk in there, having understood the enormous complexity, I'm glad I finally used the word complexity here, because really critical thinking is nothing short of the study of complex behaviors, of complex systems. You have to take everything into consideration.

And when you do that, anything you bring to the table is well-reasoned. And again, I do not see reason as narrow clinical logic, the way an engineer might apply it. I'm talking of really understanding the whole picture. Now, what does this have to do with peacebuilding? Here's the thing. And that's why earlier I talked about reinventing the West. What this means is you have to accept that China is not going to change its stripes merely because we want them to. That many conflicts in Asia and Africa will not get resolved because we believe through Getting to Yes, or whatever, that it's in people's interest to do X rather than Y.  Just as most of my liberal friends buy into the myth that Trump supporters don't vote for their interests. I mean, the sheer arrogance of that, they know their interests and their interests are very different from our, okay? And I'll stop with this. I do believe that if peacebuilding has to have a future, we have to we have to see the world for what it is.

Oh, sorry, there's one more thing I want to say. Critical thinking is about understanding reality. I hesitate to use the word "truth" because it's too loaded. But at the most basic level, emotional truth, economic truth, political truth, cultural truth, social truth. If you understand that reality, and then you respond to it, the chances are that you will not be surprised by the outcome.

Merrick: Guy, Heidi, many threads you could grab on here, but let me just give you one and you toss it away if you don't want it, right? And that is that Ashok, you've essentially as defining critical thinking as metacognition, as a holistic approach to understanding reality as it is, and something that also recognizes the deep assumptions, in some cases, perhaps you would say the failed assumptions of the peacebuilding field and dispute resolution as a whole, which makes it therefore ineffective against or with perhaps today's reality and that of the broadly the 20th and 21st century. It has failed. I'm going to be very provocative here.  Peacebuilding, in your mind, has failed to recognize and acknowledge fundamental realities of the human condition and the human mind. And therefore is insufficient to the moment as it stands, unless and until we advance the way we envision and carry out those peacebuilding activities with a holistic, critical mindset.  Now, you don't have to grab that at all, Guy or Heidi, but that is the premise that I have just heard. Is that what you heard? And what do you think?

Guy: I've been coming at it in a slightly different way that I think gets back to your point here and raises a few others. One of the most interesting podcasts I ever listened to was a Hidden Brain one that talked about right brains and left brains and how part of our brain looks at the big picture and figures out what needs to be done. And the other part of our brain is task focused and figures out how to the things that need to be done. The thing that astonished me was that this same distinction exists in the most primitive of animals. And the idea is that there are two parts of intelligence. And this goes to Ashok's point, I think, that at one level, we're really good at the task-oriented thinking. We know how to hold meetings and facilitate discussions and all that, but we're not so good at the big-picture thinking of figuring out, exactly, what needs to be done. But that quickly gets you to a case of information overload, where if you start having to really know all of this, you can't. And going back to my metaphor of the pool table, it doesn't work to really know everything and line up the perfect pool shot. So what you're really left with is the wisdom of the crowds.

Years ago, we had a guy named Wendell Jones come to one of our conferences and tell us about the distinction between complicated and complex systems. Society is a complex system. Complicated systems are mechanical. You can figure out the perfect pool shot. In complex systems, there are so many independent actors that you can't. The way complex systems learn is through evolution. You have lots of independent, small-scale actors trying to do what they see as the right thing in their particular context that nudges the overall system. So what we've been focusing on is trying, not to get people to understand the whole system, but to understand how, in particular roles and settings, they can act in ways that nudge the overall system in a more positive direction. And ultimately, there's going to be an evolutionary test. If societies organized with this sense of common interest and caring about others are more successful than societies where you have an authoritarian that's forcing everybody to do what they want.  And history suggests they're likely to be. Then we'll be better off. But it's a struggle, and it requires lots of people working in all of these different contexts. And as society changes, everybody's got to change and adapt to the new situation.

In biological ecosystems, you have the luxury of time. If you hike around in the mountains, as we do a lot, you are just struck with how long it takes things to happen. After forest fires, it takes centuries for the ecosystem to adapt to the change. Humans are changing the world very, very fast, and we don't have time to use evolutionary processes to adapt. That, I think, is our biggest challenge, to speed the learning engine, so we can do better.

Merrick: Terrific. Thank you so much, Guy. Heidi, I want to turn you here and see if you might either build on that, or thread the following, which is, well, if we take this premise of holistic thinking, of this metacognition, that is necessary to meet the moment or perhaps simply do better, what does this have to tell us, Heidi, about reinventing, if you would use that phrase, the peacebuilding field and/or making it more relevant to the post-liberal order? In other words, what is there to learn here and apply that we have not already? You've worked so deeply in intractable conflict. What else would you say about the thread between critical thinking as defined and where this field could go or needs to go?

Heidi: Okay. I want to take that backwards a little bit and say, first of all, that I completely agree with Ashok, that the peacebuilding field is based on dogma. It seems to have blinders on, and it's not perceiving the challenges that it is faced with, which is why I like to think it has failed, is that it's not perceiving what's going on in the world that it's dealing with.  At the same time, I'm not sure I believe that it is possible to take all this in. I am very much in agreement with Guy's pool analogy, that there's just so much going on that we can't take it all in, and come up with a better way of doing peacebuilding.

But, I think that there's a middle ground. We can certainly take in a lot more than we're taking in. We can certainly open our eyes to the fact that there are some people that don't believe in this stuff. There's a lot of people out there that have no interest in peace, no interest in getting along with people who are different from them.  And we can dialogue forever, and it's not going to change their fundamental views of other people or whether they want to make peace. That's not the way they do business. So we have to come up with a different approach to dealing with folks like that.

And I don't think it involves reinventing peacebuilding. I think it involves admitting that there is not a role for a peacebuilder in that situation. And we have to engage people who do other things like diplomatic-type negotiation that's much more a power-over type scenario or military. There are places where military defense or confrontation is going to be necessary. And I think, to think that peacebuilders can handle my example would be Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran. I don't think there's a role for peacebuilders in that.

Now, I do want to make one caveat statement. We have been talking for the last month via email with a former student of ours who is a peacebuilder in Israel right now. She's also in the IDF. So she's a very interesting person because she's playing both games at once. And she opened my eyes to something that I should have seen, but I hadn't really focused on, is that the peacebuilding work in Israel is working with private citizens, who she insists do want peace. And they just did a survey of 40 peacebuilding organizations that are working with Israelis and Palestinians and put out a very interesting report. And one of the things that it says is that many citizens in both of those societies do want peace.

Their leadership does not. So there is a role for the likes of Joe Biden or Harris or Trump or whomever and their secretaries of state to negotiate with leaders of Hamas and Iran and Israel and try to work out a peace agreement, totally separate from peacebuilding, which is working with the citizens on the ground. Completely different domains, completely different processes. And there is no role, I don't think, for peacebuilding in that diplomatic military track- one domain. Now, another thing that my student said that is obvious that I wasn't thinking about, is that the whole reason Oslo failed and the other peace agreements that came before that is that those were, again, negotiated at the track one level, and no effort was made to bring along the citizens. So the citizens on both sides didn't buy in. So her argument is you need the track one effort and the track two or some people call it the track three effort to be going on simultaneously. Doing their own thing —it might be totally different. But if you're ever going to get peace, you need to be doing it at both levels. And I happen to think that getting peace with the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran is only going to happen with a power over model, such that they figure out, "This is not a war we can win." The United States or whoever, Israel, is too powerful. We can't fight them. For the moment, we're just going to have to come to a settlement and live with it for a while, unfortunately, until we can rebuild our arms and fight that fight again. The best we're going to do there is a temporary settlement.  Because the leadership does not want peace. But I think keeping those two tracks -- track one and track two distinct — is important. And I don't think it's a matter of reinventing peacebuilding, which I see as track two, to do the job of track one.

Merrick: Very, very helpful, Heidi. Ashok, I'm going to turn it to you in a minute to both react with a query, if you have one, for Guy and Heidi and what you're hearing. But let me just echo a couple of things, which is that the viewpoint being that not only can we not play this pool table, we can't even understand it.  It's too complex. There is no holistic critical metacognition that allows us to play this pool table as it is. Therefore, middle ground.  Is there a way of opening ourselves to the reality that peacebuilding, as it stands and the assumptions that it's built on, is not functional in this context? In fact, I would use the phrase you didn't use it, Heidi, or Guy, "overprescribed." In the sense that thinking of as it as having application. It has utility. Answer from Guy and Heidi just now: in fact, perhaps it doesn't. It is not always the elixir solution or even belongs in that context. In fact, a different or a multi-domain approach, track one, track two, track three, that's the complexity that we need to deal with the situation. But at first, it requires an acknowledgement that the fundamental premises of peacebuilding are not fit for the context that we are confronting. This is what I'm hearing from you both. Ashok, your take and your query back to Guy and Heidi, if you have one.

Ashok: Since we have only about 10 minutes left, I am going to take a couple of minutes here to just bring the conversation back to the role of critical thinking, because I think I haven't done a good job of articulating what it is in this conversation. Because it is not about trying to understand all the balls in the pool table. That is not critical thinking. Critical thinking is not the complete truth of any situation. And I think the reason why I got interested, I still am terribly interested in bringing a critical thinking approach into peacebuilding is not to map out everything that exists in the world in order to have solutions for it. Because I don't, and this is where I agree with Heidi. Peacebuilding, as we understand it, even diplomacy, as we understand it, will not work in many situations. And as Heidi said, very often you need a military solution.

So I'm not talking about a silver bullet. Critical thinking is not a silver bullet. And this is why I teach the course and I take 12 sessions of 90 minutes each to even get people to start understanding what it means in real terms. But I believe that wherever peacebuilding is possible, wherever diplomacy is possible. It's even about coexisting with a neighbor that wishes you harm. You have to understand reality without filters. And that really is all that critical thinking tries to do. It gets you, for instance, I'll give you an example. I was reading an article in Foreign Affairs this morning where they talk about how tariffs against China are dangerous because across the board, it will create higher prices for Western consumers. And this is by a very serious scholar. And he goes on to say that we have to somehow show Xi that there is value for China in negotiating and rolling back its dumping of products, for instance, that Xi is so scared of being dominated by the West that he is exacerbating conditions. And he is editorializing.  All he thinks is necessary is for well-meaning American State Department people or the President or whoever goes in there and tells them (the Chinese), "We don't mean you harm. We want China to thrive. And if only you meet some of our needs, so that our industries are not destroyed, we could reestablish a far healthier trade relationship with China."

This is exactly what I'm talking about. This scholar has absolutely no idea about China. It is not in the Chinese interest to try to negotiate a more equitable system. China, from its entry into WTO, has been  breaking all the rules and taking advantage of the fact that the West so much wanted China to be part of WTO.  And the Western companies wanted China for all kinds of reasons, for profitability, that it closed their eyes to China. And now it's almost too late.

When I look at peacebuilding, I'm looking at the same thing. We must not walk in there with our assumptions. When I talk of critical thinking, I'm saying we become conscious of our own dogma, our own assumptions, our own theories which may not necessarily be as robust as we want them to be. And we try to be relevant. And again, I'm using peacebuilding at a very broad level. It includes, in this telling of it, diplomacy. It includes even preparing for war. All it means is that we do not project onto the world our vision of what it should be. We understand ground realities and we decide how to respond, whether militantly, whether economically, whether by sending our diplomats, whether it is practical and trying to engage with their citizens. So I'm going to stop there. But I realized that I have to do an enormous amount of work to really simplify what critical thinking is. And I think you folks have given me an idea of spelling it out in a paper, so that it's a place to start these conversations from. Thank you.

Merrick: Ashok, thank you. Guy, closing remark, a question —any spark from this conversation that you think you are taking forward? Last thoughts?

Guy: I think that the thought that I have, and this goes back to something that Heidi and I have been working very hard on, and something we call massively parallel peacebuilding or democracy building. And we've identified 53 major different roles, each of which bears on this problem of building peace in very different ways. Some are strategists, some are actors, each of which needs their own version of critical thinking to figure out how best to work in their specialized area. But the thing that's encouraging is we have a very long list of people working in all of these roles. It's not like this is some theoretical idea that we came up with and we want the world to follow. It's what we've seen, observing the world and put a word around it, and they're trying to build a website that helps make it more visible. But the natural learning process of society is learning. And it's learning through the work of these 53 different groups of folks, each of which are building on a lot of the ideas that we talked about today.

Merrick: Terrific. Thank you, Guy. Heidi, a last word, reflection, or question you're taking forward.

Heidi: Well, I'm just very interested in where we ended about the notion of critical thinking and wishing we had started there instead of ending there, but oh, well.  I think this conversation would have gone somewhat differently. I think it was a very interesting conversation. I think it would have gone differently if we had started with critical thinking, and I'd had a better understanding of what Ahsok meant by critical thinking. I didn't. And I think that's an illustration of a broader notion that words really matter. People hear all sorts of words, and they make their own assumptions about what the speaker meant. And you can go off on all sorts of tangents that are completely irrelevant, because you're making the wrong assumptions about what people meant. And it could be critical thinking, and it could be peacebuilding, and it could be peace. All of these concepts are very fraught. And people have very different images of what they mean. And I think those different images are actually a big part of the problem. We've been told for quite a while that we shouldn't use the word "peace." It's a dirty word. We shouldn't use the word "democracy." It's a dirty word. We say, "How can we talk about what we do and what we're interested in without using the words peace or democracy?" And we're getting told, "Well, we should use the word civic engagement." Well, that's nice, but that's really not it. It makes a complex job even more difficult, because the language is such a fraught area, but so important. And I think this conversation illustrated that.

Merrick: Yeah. An astute point. Ashok, I have some closing thoughts, but I want to see if you have a word from you first.

Ashok: Thank you. I'm just going to thank you, Heidi, for saying what you did. And this conversation was very important for me. And before we have any other conversations, I want to put down in a paper what I see as ,not just critical thinking, but the possible areas of intersection between that and not just peacebuilding, but conflict itself. So I think I'm going to frame it as critical thinking and conflict. And I'll share it with all three of you. And if after that, you are interested in having another conversation of this kind, I think I would love that.

Merrick: Terrific. So in closing, thank you. Thank you, all three of you, for a terrific conversation. What we mean by a reasonable peace and a critical thinking pathway to save it or otherwise or enhance it is something that begs sufficient definition. I think there is another chapter to this, but it will not happen before we get a proper paper ahead of it on these definitions.

That said, I do think we covered a lot of helpful ground. And let me just take a moment to say a few words about that. From, I think, a really articulate framing of the origins, definition, and motivation of this sort of nexus of the field from nonviolent comms to peacebuilding and conflict resolution, and the origins of that and the assumptions that have been built into those pieces, into those pathways, and the confrontation, if we will, in our minds, but also in reality, that such pathways are not always built to confront and/or navigate the actual realities that we are facing in a neoliberal context.

That critical thinking, as defined by Ashok and to be further defined, with additional definition is something that can, as understood as metacognition, as understood as holistic thinking, as understanding and treating realities as they are, not as we wish them to be. The ability to observe and be aware of our own thinking process as we are actually doing that thinking, this is a higher-order quality of thinking that we perhaps can build our capacity to do, but not perfect.

So the question is, how do we thread such competencies, not into a revised peacebuilding, but into an enhanced one, perhaps, that is, brings in those nuanced tracks, if you will, track one, two, three, or otherwise approaches to situations where, in fact, a peacebuilding cookie-cutter formula is simply not appropriate or even relevant to that moment.

We are not saying it doesn't have a place. We're saying that, in fact, if we do not rethink and enhance it using a critical thinking mindset or otherwise, and whether the other piece, the massively parallel peacebuilding threads, right? If we do not bring those to bear with the appropriate quality of thinking and capacity, we will continue to confront the same problems and the same results as we see them today. This is what I've taken away from our conversation so far.  I've probably abused your more eloquent language, and I just wanted to express my gratitude for each of you. And I'd be happy, very happy to facilitate any future conversation should you wish. Thank you, everybody.

Heidi and Guy: Thank you very much.

Ashok: Thanks so much. You've done a spectacular job. And Heidi and Guy, thanks for being open to this and I hope to send you a paper.