Mm. Roger Benaco to is the president of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. So nice to have you talked to me today. You have said that you are concerned that American democracy is at risk. Explain what you mean by at risk. Exactly. And how bad do you see it to be? At this moment, a democracy is only stable and only thrives if it has an effective citizenry. And so if we don't fix this problem, we're not going to have a democracy that functions into perpetuity. We're seeing things fraying right now. We're seeing not well informed, uh, citizens we're seeing. Not well engaged, not productively. Well engaged citizens. And we're seeing all of the measures around. Hope and trust going down. How do you even measure citizen development? What is that? What? A citizen development. Like up? Yep. You're You're fully developed as a citizen. So we're saying there are three major parts of being a great citizen. The first is you have to be civically well informed. You have to be media literate. You have to get your information from multiple sources. The second is you have to be productively engaged for the common good you have to vote, you have to engage in your community through volunteer organizations. And the third is you have to be hopeful about democracy. And that means being hopeful about the way in which our country is moving, but also trusting, trusting your neighbor, trusting your institutions and trusting your government. How do you get there when the reality of of the environment that's out there is not supporting good citizenry? Part of what needs to be done even more is to complicate the narrative. We have such a polarized society that is driven by 280 characters, that it doesn't complicate the narrative and it doesn't share in the humanity of everyone. Just the fact that someone disagrees with me on policy doesn't make them any less American than me. But that's the kind of narrative we're driving now. How do we address that? We get especially young people to start to engage in that more complicated set of views and understanding our history in understanding other people's points of view in spending the time in not only social media but going beyond that and diving deeper into the issues, the historical underpinnings for how things happen and being able to be engaged in a conversation with people who think differently. I'm curious. If there is a majority that believes in racial justice and democracy, why is the progress that direction so slow when you're trying to change behaviors and practices? That takes time and it takes generations? Sometimes. Are we moving fast enough? No. Is there a whole set of issues and structural racism that still exist? Absolutely. Do we have a greater understanding of that now than we've ever had in the past? Yes, the last 2-3 years have brought that reckoning to everybody's TV screen in a way they never had to reckon with. We're making steps forward. Rajiv Dakota is the president of the Institute for Citizens and Scholars. So nice to talk to you. Thank you as well.