Ep 138 | Why Would a Lefty Talk to Glenn Beck? | Monica Guzman | The Glenn Beck Podcast

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people talk about bridging the political divide, but actually doing something about it is a different story.

Journalists especially are bad about it.

They whine about political division, even though they're one of the biggest causes of it, in my opinion.

As a journalist and a thinker, today's guest is the exception.

She takes a unique approach, curiosity, honest questioning.

She wants to reclaim curiosity.

Now, she's a former Nieman Fellow, host of Northwest Newsmakers.

She's from Seattle.

I mean, it would sound like we have something in common there, but it pretty much stops there.

We disagree probably on most things,

except

what we're going to talk about today.

And I think that's the most important thing we can talk about.

She's the digital director of storytelling at Braver Angels.

That's a grassroots organization dedicated to bridging the partisan divide.

A lot of people talk about that, but how do you actually do it and keep your principles?

She does tell stories.

In her new book, I never thought of it that way.

She tells the stories that Americans need to hear.

She also came highly recommended by a friend and network regular Bridget Fedesey.

So I know she will be great.

It's a fascinating conversation where two people that don't see eye to eye on most things, can they find their way to each other?

Please welcome Monica Guzman.

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Hi, Monica.

Hi, Glenn.

How are you?

I'm very good.

We're both from Seattle, or at least you live in Seattle now.

Yes, I do.

I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, and a lot of the things that you talk about in your book are just the way I was raised and the way it used to be.

And I don't know why it's not like that anymore.

So why don't we

start with the election 2016?

This is how you open the book, and I think it's a great way to describe where we are.

Yeah, the election 2016 in Seattle, a very blue place politically.

I remember the day after the city fell dead.

Lots of folks were completely shocked and stunned, almost outside of ourselves.

And

pretty soon after that, I would go to events in Seattle, you know, networking events, get-togethers, what have you, and I would hear people talk about the latest thing that really scared them about Trump being president, about some headline, something that was just, ah, and inevitably the conversation would wind its way to who's to blame and it's people who voted for Trump.

Now

my parents are Mexican immigrants who voted for Trump.

I am also a Mexican immigrant.

We became citizens in the year 2000.

And,

whoa, boy, we've had a roller coaster of time together where we've gotten to talk about our differences.

But whenever I heard this at the events I was in, you know, people being scared, people thinking these people who voted for Trump

must be awful people, I felt personally implicated.

And I thought,

but they're not.

Y'all don't know, my parents are not these things.

They're not.

And

if we could talk to each other past the fears we have, maybe the anxiety we're feeling, maybe it wouldn't be placed on our fellow Americans.

Maybe there'd be some other way that we could think about it.

And so I wanted to download all of that to them, but of course, I couldn't, right?

It's just a quick conversation.

So what I would sit there and hope for is, well, what I would do is I would say, I'd find a moment.

I'd find a moment to say, well, my parents are Mexican immigrants who voted for Trump.

And I sort of called it like my unintentional party trick because conversation would just stop

because it's obviously surprising.

And people would look at me and my heart would start to beat, right?

Because I'm thinking, what are they thinking?

Are they looking at me with suspicion?

You know, are we going to change the subject?

But a lot of times I would sit and ask, would somebody ask me why?

Would somebody get curious about why they voted for Trump?

That's what I would hope for.

How often did that happen?

I would say, honestly, maybe like 70% of the time.

Good.

Not too bad.

Now, but did it always happen in that big open conversation?

No.

Sometimes it would be someone would find me later and say, hey, by the way, you said your parents voted for Trump.

Why?

How?

What happened?

And my parents are awesome enough that they've given me leave to represent, you know, a little bit of their story as I can.

And so I would give them some of their reasons and they'd go, oh, okay,

okay, you know.

And it felt almost like an obligation because in Seattle, I know a lot of people who don't know anyone, really, who voted for Trump, anyone close to them.

So I almost felt like I was representing, you know, somebody they did not know.

And I could be the reason that they would question their own assumptions.

In New York, liberals assume everybody in the room is like them.

In Texas, conservatives assume everybody in the room is like them.

And we don't,

there is no discovery.

There is no

questioning.

There's no room for any kind of diversity.

I mean, we're having diversity shoved down our throat when it doesn't really even mean diversity.

Because we don't embrace diversity of the most important kind, thought.

Yeah, there's a thinker, Ibu Patel,

who says something that gave me sort of an aha moment, what I call an I Never Thought of It That Way moment, and I watched him give a talk about this, and he said, it's not just the diversity you like.

Yes.

It's not just the diversity you like.

And at that time, I was feeling the sense of, man, we do talk about diversity in this society, rightly so.

We've got to be mixing it up to make sure that our perspectives stay rich and combined and that we are a society that disagrees, that figures it out, that negotiates.

But

that does mean that if we are this afraid of people who disagree with us,

if I play that out in my head, I don't know how that leads us to a good place.

So here's, maybe you can help me figure a few things out.

It kills me that both sides are afraid of fascism, but they don't recognize the fascist in their own side.

You know,

I've heard so many conservatives who are like, we just got to get rid of these people.

And you're like, what do you mean, get rid of these?

What does that mean exactly?

You know what I mean?

Or we just, we all love the Constitution, but we got to do what we got to do.

No, we don't have to do that.

That's a wrong stance.

So I hear that.

But I also, I mean, you know, we

had a good number of one party that said jail people that disagreed on the COVID vaccine, jail people if you disagree on the global warming solutions.

I mean we've had some really fascistic things.

ESG is a fascistic idea that's coming, I think, from the business world.

Why do we fail to see the fascism on on both sides?

Well, I look at that a different way

because that label fascist carries a lot of power.

And when I talk about curiosity, I'm talking about curiosity also about the labels that we affix to things.

So to describe something as fascist, to describe something as racist, to describe something as whatever you want, colors it a certain way, where then our society is so polarized that you almost signal to people you should be for this or against this.

So one thing I would say is just like caution about those labels because,

I mean,

you know, I think that there's a lot of ways that we can describe different things.

Is fascist the best label?

I don't know.

Okay, so wait, but wait, but wait, wait, wait for a second.

You know, Mitt Romney, when he was running as a Republican, the Democrat said he is the devil himself.

He's just horrible, horrible, horrible.

No, he's not.

No, he's not.

You know, and that happens over and over and over again.

And so fascism has lost its meaning.

But when you are talking about comply or else,

agree or else, that is fascism.

And we do have that on our doorstep.

I do think that we,

the way I frame it for myself, is,

yes, we have reached this point where we believe we have to draw really clear, bold lines and put some people on the other side of that line

and just say, just say, this is intolerable.

The problem is, there's a lot of social science research that's telling us that we are grossly exaggerating the views on our other side.

Correct.

And when we exaggerate them and then believe the exaggerations, guess what?

We're not living in reality.

We're just not.

So,

you know,

I travel the country.

I assume you travel the country.

The country is not as divided as it is seen.

Okay.

It's just not.

However,

I think the problem is, as an immigrant, you might recognize this more than others.

Our unum has been lost from many, one,

and e pluribus unum.

Our unum, what brought people to America in the first place was the Constitution, I'm sorry, the Bill of Rights.

That you have certain God-given rights that no government or anybody else can change.

And we always had that in common, but we don't have that in common anymore.

So

when we're talking about issues, and I mean,

I have conservative friends who tell me, yeah, well, you know,

the Fourth Amendment, you know, we've got to do the things.

No, no.

You either believe in the Bill of Rights or you don't.

And we don't have an America if we don't have the Bill of Rights.

We're not talking about

actual rights.

We're deciding whether you have a right to speak because I disagree with you or if I should be shut up because I disagree with so-and-so.

Neither of us should be shut up.

Isn't that our common ground that we should be seeking?

I think so.

But I would add this.

You know, the complications of it, of course, is how

is the anxiety in the world right now.

I'm sure you feel it.

I feel it.

People feel it in their families.

We're not inviting people to Thanksgiving anymore.

We're breaking up relationships with people who give our lives meaning over the anxiety that we feel about the time we're in and the high stakes of so many of our policies, especially when our political identity,

it's who we are for a lot of people.

It's really become who we are.

So when someone disagrees with our opinion, it feels like they are invalidating us.

So

I want to acknowledge that because in a climate of fear,

when we're afraid, we seek certainty.

And certainty is the arch villain of curiosity.

Amen.

So once you, right, but again, it's like, I understand why people go to certainty because when we're afraid, we can't just be sitting back going, I don't know, let me ask a lot of questions.

No, you can't wonder about something you think is out to get you.

You're going to want to run away.

You're going to want to shut them out.

But that's the

animal man.

If we're going to survive, we have to be able to fight the animal man to be able to say, look,

yeah, there are scary things out there, but are you scary?

Are you scary?

You know, I have tried for years to have conversations with people on the left, and you can't get it.

And if anyone comes on my show, I mean, you'll see the wrath of everybody

for

how can you possibly talk to that guy?

Yeah.

It's

we get nowhere.

We get nowhere if we can't talk to each other because

we may leave disagreeing on really important things.

However, we at least understand one another and see the other as having a right to exist and to speak and to be my neighbor.

Right, right.

And

I'll point this out.

You know, you said I've had people, I've had, tried to have conversations on the left, they won't do it.

And I would say that's a lot of certainty.

So I talk about in the book.

Well, it's a lot of trying over years.

But it is getting better.

But, but, but, but think of it this way, right?

I talk in the book about the conditions for a curious conversation.

And one of the most important is something I call containment.

You know, on your show, this is a public platform with a lot of people listening.

The less contained a conversation to the people actually participating in it, the less honest and open people feel they can be.

And the more they'll be tempted to perform their views, you know, rather than actually put them out there and vulnerably explore them with someone else.

So you bring in a lot of conditions that get in the way of people really being honest.

And that's just human nature.

Right.

So I talk about, you know, conversations on social media.

Yeah, it might be really tough to really get somewhere, especially if you have an invisible audience of who knows how many people who are seeing your Twitter thread or your Facebook thread.

We almost never stop and think how weird it is that so much of our opinion exchange happens on platforms where we don't know who's listening or what they think about it.

And that's weird.

But we've made it normal.

So it's the one-on-one conversations where no one's tempted to perform.

There's no one else around.

You really can say, you know, I just want to understand.

This is confounding.

Can we talk about it?

That's where the likelihood is highest.

So

I completely agree with you.

The only reason I feel some urgency on this is

because this has been going on for a long time, and I'm a student of history.

And what was really interesting to me about 2006,

I started seeing this kind of trend

towards this and maybe 2004 even.

And

as I was doing some research on some other things and spent some time researching the Holocaust, et cetera, et cetera, the thing that I noticed in all those who saved Jews was about 80% of them said,

well, this is my Jew.

This is, I know these people.

So they didn't say, all Jews are fine.

They said, no, I know this one.

And so this one, this group.

And that's a very big difference between

what we're doing to a group of people is wrong.

And

I worry that our private conversations, because we all know somebody that voted differently, and we say, well, no, they're my parents.

I know them because they're my parents.

But

that doesn't save the world.

You know what I mean?

It doesn't, it's a beginning.

So how do we.

It is a beginning.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah.

I think that it's a practice.

This is a practice.

At this point, you know, I work at a nonprofit called Braver Angels, which is the largest cross-partisan nonprofit working to depolarize America.

I've talked to a lot.

I'm liberal.

I've talked with a lot of conservatives, a lot of libertarians.

And the more that I do it, the easier easier it gets.

The more that I do it,

the less that the assuming part of my mind gets away with

allowing me to make blanket conclusions about a bunch of people I don't know.

Yeah.

Because every person surprises me.

So after long enough of that, I go, well, what the heck am I doing making blanket assumptions about groups of people I don't know?

Right.

Especially at a time like this.

Now, you know, one could argue at a time that isn't so wound up, you know, where all these institutions seem to be driving us apart,

maybe we'd have a healthier, discursive ecosystem.

And this would.

Our divisions wouldn't be so blinding, right?

But right now, our divisions are blinding.

And so I say we have to counteract them.

We have to proactively counteract them.

To your point, it's true.

I mean, what you said about, you know, my Jew or my Trump supporter

is well taken.

And it really

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You know,

I saw your work

with your better angels or braver angels.

And

I want to know

when we come together,

because I saw one instance where

one of the founders said, you know, we just need to compromise.

And I think there's a lot of people, really honestly, on both sides that say,

no, I won't compromise.

And

there's reasonable compromise, and then there's

unreasonable.

And I don't know what the difference, I mean, I know what

I refuse to compromise on, and

those are the principles outlined in the Bill of Rights.

I'll compromise on everything else.

I mean, let's talk about it.

But those things, when you go in against the individual, and say any individual doesn't have these rights for any reason.

No.

But everything else is up for discussion.

So

do you think that that's the

question that comes to mind when you say that is, do you think that that's the perception of, because, because I

let me let me step back.

I think that if each of us were to be really honest about, I'm willing to have conversations about all these things, but not these little things over here, not little, but that they're big, but they're over here.

If we all were honest about each other, we would recognize that, oh, wow, there's actually a lot on the table that we can talk about.

But the perception is the opposite.

The perception is that no one wants to compromise about anything.

And

it's just not true.

Correct.

But wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

But compromising on principles is a problem.

Yeah, okay.

I hear.

Yeah, I hear that.

I think that's right.

I have a chapter in the book about values.

One of the phrases that I hear a lot when people say, I can't have, I cannot talk to people if they're on the left.

I cannot talk to people on the right, and vice versa, is they don't share my values.

They don't share my values.

And therefore, I'm done.

I got nothing.

I can't open up to them.

But here's the thing.

We do share our values.

We just stack them in a different order for different issues.

And that,

when I realized that, it changed the game for me

because

it gets easy to think,

for example, that a lot of our fellow Americans are against freedom.

But when you really stop and think about that for a moment, who is against freedom?

Nobody's against freedom.

It's just that maybe in the case of the COVID vaccine, Some people have, you know, lots of people have a value that comes ahead of liberty liberty that they think is really important and leads them to support vaccine mandates for example right

and in the case of I don't know abortion right you've got you've got the the life I mean we all like yes of course we all have a value for respecting life but we also have a value for respecting you know somebody's right to thrive and live the way they want to freely so so it's wicked issues put values into tension you know and it's tempting to think well, if we just did this, I'd be happy.

Well, that's great, but you're just one person and we're millions of people.

It's, we have to, the only way that we can figure out the best balance in our policy to negotiate how our values come into tension is if we talk to each other.

So if we say, I won't talk to them because they don't endorse my principles, even that, it's like, are you sure?

Are we sure?

Well, can we take those two?

Let's have a discussion on those two things

um okay because um but first of all both of those are extraordinarily difficult i mean these are you know especially abortion there is i have three daughters i i mean i

my daughter is raped or has a uh you know whatever i am

The last thing I want her to do is to go through something that is traumatizing her over and over and over again.

So I don't want to judge anyone in any situation.

However, I have to look at

life and define life.

And I might define that differently than you, but I should not be condemned for

defining that.

And you shouldn't be condemned if you're willing to say, yes, I know it's life, but, okay, then you have an honest conversation, and we can say, We just disagree on this.

And, you know, I have no problem if California wants to do what they want to do, but don't force Texas to do something.

You know what I mean?

If you're living in a group of people that

their ideas match, that's totally fine, in my opinion.

But

we can't have that conversation because

we're either baby killers or we're evil conservatives that don't care about women.

Neither one of those are true.

Exactly.

Exactly.

And yet the loudest voices are the ones, you know,

I don't just want to say, you know, on the extremes.

No,

the loudest voices are the folks who care the most and for whom the alternative is to what they want is just not acceptable.

You know, so people will stop at nothing the more that they care.

And that's good.

That's good for our democracy.

It is.

That's great.

What's bad is when it's not balanced out by enough of us who are able to bridge, to build the bridge, to have the conversations.

Instead, what we're seeing, oh, and this, I don't know if this disturbs you as much as it disturbs me, but there's been some recent reporting about how our blue zip codes are getting bluer and our red zip codes are getting redder.

And why?

Because we don't want to be uncomfortable in our lives.

We want to live in places that we think accept us.

And the more that we draw lines against other people and make people feel like they can't be themselves when they disagree politically with their community, guess what?

We're dividing ourselves.

Yeah.

And that's human nature.

And that's human nature.

It is.

It is.

But that's because

we have gone through 15 years of

being told that we are one thing when we are not and no one is actually talking about the truth and you know you just brought up the extremes on on each side there are extremes on the uh the right i because i look at i don't look at right and left like europe does i would say they're on the left but the fascists on the the very you know the white supremacist fascist nazis um i don't want anything to do with them and i think that there are the anarchists and the i'm gonna burn the city of Portland down to the ground on the left.

And I don't think, I don't think any more than maybe 10 or

maybe, maybe 15% of the nation relates to those people.

Not even, not even that.

I hope not.

Right.

I mean, I don't think so.

I think I'm being generous.

But it's those people that

we're made to look like, you're made to look like.

And it doesn't seem that there's anyone in the press that cares to do anything about that.

Yeah, and being in the press, I know, I completely empathize with that.

I mean, I'm glad you brought that up because here's the thing is like, what happens in the world matters.

Our perception and interpretation of what happens in the world matters more.

So what we have done is we've taken the stories of that small, extreme minority that is most scary, and we've blown it up in our heads to take up a lot more space than they deserve.

and we do this on both sides and then that becomes our reality that becomes what what actually motivates our behaviors and of course the media you know that you know this right the media reflects the public it has to it reflects the public's perceptions and perspectives now you know having been for many years a journalist who takes very seriously the discipline of fact that that exists at the core of responsible journalism, I know lots of journalists who absolutely want to to change this.

They are fighting against some incentives in the economics of media that just, the wall is so thick.

I mean, my goodness, right?

So I think about that sometimes, that if you pluck, if you pluck a particular journalist, right, if you just go one by one and you ask them, do you enjoy these divided times?

Do you love how the media is contributing to this polarization, the way we feel each?

None of them like it, right?

And yet,

but the system remains.

And the same with politicians.

I've interviewed members of Congress who one-on-one will tell me, I can't even govern.

This is terrible.

You know, but there they are in Congress playing the game.

But

doesn't that go back to where we started, though?

That's an individual thing.

I mean,

the right makes fun of me for this, and I stand by it.

People in my own company say, oh, those were the years of the Glenn's apology tour.

And that's when I was willing to go back to people and say, look,

I will admit this, this, and this, poorly handled, stupidly phrased, or wrong.

I'll admit those things, but that's what we have to do on both sides.

And no one was willing to pick up that challenge because

the

consequences were too grave.

Yeah, it's humility.

Oh man, right?

The association between humility and weakness is so strong when the stakes are so high.

And when we've set up this binary and each side thinks, you know, you've probably seen the polls, right?

Each side thought that if the other side won, it would be like the end of the nation.

An incredibly high number of people thought that, right?

So

yeah,

humility

is a difficult thing,

is a difficult thing to take on individually, particularly again, if it's public, if it's not contained.

We all want to belong.

And what if we're on social media and something somebody says actually makes us think different?

We're not going to admit it.

Oh no.

Because my sister or my friend might see, right?

But

we have this belief that if we veer away, if we begin to explore on our convictions, then we've lost any convictions.

Then we're done.

Then we don't know who we are anymore.

We don't know where we belong.

We have to be part of the side where we're accepted.

And veering away from that is just too scary.

And what I would say is, why?

Why is that so scary?

Especially if it's quite honestly like our relationships.

You become very frightening to a lot of people when you don't care.

But you don't care about what?

You don't care about the consequences of

this group of people not liking you anymore.

Well, we won't be your friends.

Well, then you shouldn't shouldn't have been my friends in the first place.

I'm sorry, I was your friend if that's what you thought that we all had to think alike to be friends.

Yeah, yeah, but but let's be honest, you know, that that takes courage because again, it's like there's nothing more primitive and essential to the human experience than feeling connected and like we belong to a group.

And when we lose that, I've talked to folks who have changed their minds in enormous ways, really taken big swings, lost their communities.

Oh, yeah.

It can be so painful.

I think, in your experience, you've experienced some of that.

It's like it can be so painful when people look at you and think, oh no, are they betraying something?

Are they betraying their values by talking to the other side?

Are they betraying their values by getting humble or exploring perspective?

You know, but I would say is,

when we're so divided that we're blinded, we're betraying our values when we don't get cured.

Exactly right.

That's what we're doing.

Yeah.

Because we're actually allowing false perceptions to become effective reality.

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What's amazing to me is if you are true to what you believe, most people, I don't know if they know what they believe, but if you're true to what you believe,

like for instance, I really thought

Donald Trump was going to be an absolute nightmare, not for all the things.

He was a nightmare on all the things that we all all thought.

He was, you know, the Twitter and all of that stuff.

Yep, that's

a, you know, it was a circus.

We got that.

But I didn't think he would move the embassy to Israel, which I find very important.

I didn't think he'd do a lot of the things that he did.

And

I was dead set against him.

But I said on the air, if he does these things, I'll be happy to admit I'm wrong.

So I betrayed people in my audience that will say, you know, oh, you went this way.

And then

halfway through when I thought,

okay, I like his policies, you know what I mean?

I have to admit I was wrong about this, this, and this.

And that was a betrayal again.

So if you really know what you believe and you're honest, you will constantly betray other people.

who never change their mind about anything or never take in new information.

That's what it's all about, new information.

Yeah.

Yeah, because we get afraid that we'll lose ourselves.

I think that's one of the ultimate fears everyone carries:

there's something about who I am that is so inextricably tied to what I believe today

that I will not be accepted

if I let some of those, if I let some airport in between those beliefs.

How did you come up with that?

You're the only person I've ever, because I've said that, I'm an alcoholic, and the scariest thing in recovery is

is getting out of your own pain and problems because

that's what you've become

and so if you lose all that is there anything left inside is there anything and it's terrifying I've never heard anybody else say that Where did you come up with that?

Where did you, how did you find that?

What a great question.

I mean,

I don't know.

That's the honest answer.

I don't know.

I don't know.

For me,

it's about the conflation of a person with an opinion and how that keeps us from seeing the person at all.

You know, I talk about how the internet is a non-place that makes us into non-people.

If you go to social media, a lot of times you'll see people put at the same level of their name,

their cause.

When we wear, we wear our opinions as us.

We literally dress in that.

What that does to our ability to think really at all sometimes, to think for ourselves, to be able to open up to other perspectives,

it is, I think it's honestly that.

I was a tech columnist for many years, so now I'm realizing.

I think it was that.

I think it was watching the discourse in social media.

I got on social media very early when it was so novel and everyone thought it was going to save the world and everyone was going to connect.

You remember that?

Man, it was, you know, I wrote columns back then about how great old things were.

And then human nature eventually populated those platforms the way it populates everything else.

And we ended up making it more about performance and

signaling and belonging and creating groups, beautiful things, beautiful things, except at a time of high anxiety.

So more and more, more I see people do the thing where they identify themselves so closely with an idea that it's almost just like putting up a wall immediately that I am this opinion.

And then we all start to think that we are our opinions, that that's all we are.

Instead of,

which keeps us from getting curious about where people came from, you know, asking where someone's come from, the path they walk to their views, is one of the most powerful ways to understand where they are.

And I talk in the book a lot about that, is ask about about people's paths.

We often get stuck in the opinion showdown.

My opinion versus your opinion, and that's the only conversation we can have.

And most people can't defend their opinion very well.

Sure, that may be true.

I don't know.

I have found that

a lot of people can't go very deep.

When you start, and that's the other thing about it, just asking questions.

When you start asking questions, a lot of times things fall apart because they haven't,

you know, your opinion is on this subject is also connected to all of these other things that you know and believe.

So how is that working?

Yes.

And what that means is that we often don't, we often hold an opinion that we didn't actually do all that much deliberative work to arrive at.

It just came as a bundle.

Correct.

It's like the bundle package.

Correct.

Bought the bundle.

Right.

And there it is.

And I've heard that from a lot of folks actually who will tell me, especially after doing some kind of Braver Angels workshop, as a couple folks have told me, you know, it helped me realize that I haven't really thought about my opinions all that much.

Uh-huh.

Yeah, they haven't.

We let people like a little.

Yeah, we let people like me give you an opinion.

I've always said,

do your own homework.

You don't own anything except for the things that you've done your own work to discover.

I have done my work, so I know these things are true to me until new information comes along.

But you can't live off of what I've discovered.

You have to discover it.

And

I think people make the excuse that, well, I'm busy, and they are busy, but there is nothing more important than some of the things that we're talking about right now.

Yeah, yeah.

And yeah, we are busy because that's the other thing.

The social media ethic that's really permeated how we communicate, in my view, also seems to promote this idea that we all need to have an opinion about everything.

And that's, there's a lot going on in the world.

You know, so

there's got to be some limit to that.

So, so people do feel this pressure.

That's like, well, I haven't had time to look into this, that, or the other thing, but I'm feeling this pressure to have an opinion.

And so, fine, I'll throw up a meme, I'll put something up, I'll make my, I'll stake my claim, you know, because I'm being pushed to, or I feel pressured to, but I wasn't able to get there myself.

You know, but I think about how we don't see with our eyes, we see with our whole biographies.

Because this ethic of opinion also makes us think

somewhat absurdly, that in the course of one conversation or one meme or one thread, we should be able to change someone else's mind.

That this reason that I'm holding in my hand, this reason that worked magic on me, well, all I have to do is give it to you and it will work the same magic on you.

And when it doesn't, I'm befuddled.

But actually, it's like we each have roots going all the way down through our whole lives.

Everything we've experienced, everything we've seen, there's no way for someone else to immediately access all that.

And there shouldn't be, by the way.

So we arrive at our opinions.

If we're honest, we arrive at them.

You know?

It's not like we can just choose to change them on a dime.

Do you think that comes from

the

wanting to win?

Or,

you know,

one of the things I have a problem with Christianity

is

the idea of, I've got to get you into the waters of baptism.

No,

I don't need to do that.

And you're not going to do that until you are prepared to do that.

Here's what I want to do.

I want to be your friend.

I want to love you for who you are, how you are.

And

you might notice things that are different in me.

And then you will ask,

why do you have this whatever?

And if it happens to be because of my faith, then I will tell you that.

And then you choose that.

That's the only way we try to win.

We try, I've got to be friends with this person so I can get them to believe X, Y, and Z.

That's

the worst thing you can do.

The worst thing you can do.

Yeah, and that is probably one of the hardest things about

breaking some of these habits that we are in.

It is,

I say in the book at one point that even though I asked people,

even though I told people in Seattle, well, my parents are Mexican immigrants who voted for Trump.

I love them dearly.

I see them every weekend and I would wait to see if someone asked why.

What I had a lot of a harder time telling them is not just that I knew some of their reasons, but that I understood them and that if I had been them, I would have voted for Trump too.

That was the level of understanding I had reached.

But I knew that

if I said that,

oh man,

I was just very afraid of what people's reactions would be to that, and so I'd held back.

But there is a kind of,

to accept a person,

you don't have to agree with them.

Amen.

You know?

You don't have to agree with them.

To have a relationship with a person, you don't have to agree with them.

Now, if your disagreement is something that you feel goes so against your constitution that you can't stomach being around them, I understand.

I understand that.

You know, but I would say, keep questioning your certainty about that.

You know, but

this is an individual journey for everybody.

There's no formula that works the same.

There's someone I have in mind who reached out to me,

having never really met before, but sent me an email that

their son had just told them that they didn't want him seeing his grandkids anymore

he was he was liberal his son was conservative they lived in a very conservative town and I talked to this person and one of the things that

this person hadn't realized was that he was really the only liberal in his son's life.

And at that moment, you you know, he thought,

maybe what his son,

you know, the resentment and suspicion that his son is aiming at him has more to do with the resentment and suspicion he's aiming at the whole group, everything he deems threatening on the left, and putting it on one person.

And so that helped him feel a little bit better, but the relationship is still pretty strained.

He actually emailed me again not that long ago.

Things Things had gotten better.

He was able to go to the grandkids' sports games and things like that at school, but then it got bad again.

I mean, I've heard stories like this a lot,

and

it's very challenging for people.

It's really, really hard.

So, let me ask you:

how do you feel about what happened in Canada with the Truckers?

Oh,

what part?

That they went, they protested by

accounts.

They were peaceful

and they had an emergency order.

They lost their trucks, their farms, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, and bank accounts were frozen at one time.

Oh, yeah, they still are.

They still are.

Yeah.

I mean, let me tell you, I'm here in Washington, D.C.

Yesterday, I went with my parents to the Smithsonian Museum of American History.

Yeah.

And there's a beautiful,

it like, I I was like crying at a couple things.

I was very sentimental about it, but there's a beautiful exhibit about democracy.

Yeah.

And a section of it about protests and about the importance of that in American history.

That,

yeah, that even at times of extraordinary suspicion, you know, the ability to go out and disrupt,

disrupt each other.

in order to be seen

is such an important part of our democracy.

And different groups have employed it different ways.

Sometimes it's more reckless, sometimes it's entirely wrapped in an ethic of nonviolence.

You know, thank you, Martin Luther King.

But it's such an important part of our thing.

So I will say,

I personally, this is what I'm thinking now, I could always change my mind, but I personally was very concerned about

I was very concerned about the reaction

to the protest and the truckers.

So how do we?

because I I mean

I I mean I've met with people who marched in BLM.

I mean there was a shooting here

in Dallas and a shooting brings real clarity to everybody who is there and it broke down all barriers and we had an ability to talk and you know there are some real issues in America on everything.

But if we can't

If we can't express ourselves and we have a, you know, nobody believes anything anymore.

And I think that's partly because of

government and media shutting people up and shutting them down.

You buy conspiracy theories when nothing makes sense and you can't talk about it.

So the role of the media

not being a

call the balls and the strikes.

What I do is different.

I am a I'm a commentator.

I'm not a news source.

I'm a commentator.

There is a real role for call the balls and the strikes and hold people accountable.

But it doesn't seem anybody in journalism is willing to do that.

The way I see it,

I think people in journalism, a lot of them are wrestling with values put into tension.

And absolutely, I mean, journalism has for so long been like, of course, free speech, of course.

I mean, gosh, aren't we, first of all, so grateful that we live in the United States of America and not Russia or where I come from?

Mexico, good luck being a journalist there and feeling like you can tell the truth, right?

No, we have an extraordinary tradition of journalism.

And what I'll say is this, I don't know a single journalist, you know, even those who really come down, you know, maybe more on the side of, oh my gosh, we've got to regulate, this is crazy.

Even they are doing it because they love America and they're afraid that something has cut down to the bone and that if we don't act, I think a lot of people are acting out of this fear, that if we don't act

to stop certain things from being,

I don't know, from spreading, you know, like the ideas that misinformation, if whatever you want to call it, the ideas that misinformation is like a virus in and of itself, that it infects, if you give it air, you know, and then we'll all come crashing down.

That's the fear.

And so I think people are acting out of that fear, but not because they don't respect the value of expression.

Right, but that is like people saying, I love the Constitution, but we have to do what we have to do.

No, you can't, you can't, you can't, you have to put a fire out with water.

And if you are willing to say

lies on either side, if you're willing to lie, to cover up or to distort,

you're part of the problem because

that will only lead to more destruction and more distrust, won't it?

That's right, that's right.

But again, it's like a lot of people are justifying not being truthful because they think it's ultimately, it's like the ends justify the means.

We're protecting our democracy.

And I would agree.

I don't want to live in a culture that takes that as its MO going forward.

I would rather build a curious culture that isn't so afraid of other people and is open to hearing, look, if like, let's say I'm having a conversation with someone who really, really, really, at least as far as what I know, has drawn a false conclusion, like, call it whatever you want, you know, something conspiratorial, just false.

Even then,

even then, we think we have to stay at the level of what's true.

No, you can go and have a conversation about the level of what's meaningful.

Because,

how do I put this?

I think false stories spread because

there's something in them that speaks to what's true for people.

Because they might acknowledge your concern.

Because they might, you know,

it's a Hitler trick or a Stalin trick.

Speak.

I need to change.

Put the little bit of truth in and wrap it in that.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's propaganda 101.

The only way to defeat it is for people to listen to each other's concerns, not be turned off, not be scared away by the fact that people have drawn false or even awful conclusions.

I mean, obviously it's scary.

Obviously this is very difficult, obviously, and for some people more than others.

But when we dismiss the whole person because of a false conclusion that they've drawn,

we miss the opportunity to hear the true concerns, the real experiences, the paths that they've walked.

These are paths of our fellow Americans.

There's no fake news there.

You know?

Like, these these are our experiences.

Let's see them.

Let's ask each other why does this resonate with you?

Oh, it's because of this.

I get that.

That I can relate to.

There's not been a single conversation I've had with someone who I think has drawn a dubious conclusion where I did not find truth in their story.

Where I did not find something relatable and common.

So, so it's really about people.

You know, we're all about opinions.

No, this is about people.

And we can't stop seeing each other.

We can, no matter what.

And so, yeah,

let's get ourselves back to a place where we can speak to each other again.

We're going to have to build some trust to do that so that the fear goes down.

How do you do that when you don't have a system

of politics, social media, media,

anything that is a cultural force?

how do you do that?

I mean, it's one thing to be courageous.

People are courageous.

They really are.

They want to be good.

They want to come together.

They are tired of hating everybody.

They hate it.

They're done with it.

But

you don't feel as if

you're validated at all.

If you're on the right, that's the way you feel.

There's no validation at all for me being a reasonable individual that doesn't want to overthrow the government, that doesn't want everybody dead, that it, you know, there's no expectation.

It feels

the expectation is you're bad, you're a Christian, so you want to just, you know, burn crosses or what.

How do we break that?

Yeah, you're right to point out one of the biggest disadvantages we have is a lack of shared identity.

You know, we don't have something.

What it means to be an American

is in a really interesting debate right now.

It's existential, okay?

And that's going to work itself out.

We're not going to be able to force that.

That's going to have to emerge.

So what I say is the way we do that is to work within our own lives and within our own relationships.

You said earlier, all of us know someone.

All of us know someone.

Now, when I talk about this, I often get people who say on both sides,

wait a second, you know, you want me to talk to somebody who, you know, is the absolute extreme, you want me to talk to a Nazi tomorrow?

No,

do not have to talk to a Nazi tomorrow.

No one said that.

It's just that this is so scary that we go straight to the worst case scenario and argue that.

Let's not argue that.

No, that's not even, no, that's dumb.

Don't do that.

But look at your own life.

And if there is someone that you have felt more distant from, that you have put distance or they've put distance from you,

can you take one step closer to them?

And the book, you know, my book has a lot of practical tips on this, but

yeah, but I think something that's very powerful is

to get from the level of opinion to the level of experience and say, instead of why do you believe what you believe, ask people, How did you come to believe what you believe?

Ask them to tell you a story.

And that's very unthreatening,

so long as, you know, you're not

going to mention the long game.

Let's just play this scenario out with me, and I'm not going to give you answers.

I just want to see, let's say I'm an uncle that you haven't seen in a long time, and you know, I voted for Trump, and, you know,

I just hate them liberals.

Talk to me.

Yeah, yeah.

Let's say, are we in person?

Sure, yeah.

We're like this.

Just this.

Yeah, great.

So let's say that we're in person.

Yeah, in a place where there's time.

It's not like you're on the way out the door and wouldn't bring anything up then.

Yeah.

Right?

Yeah, so certain conditions are in place.

Great.

Hey, Uncle Glenn, do you have a minute?

Sure.

Yeah.

So I've never gotten the chance to ask you about something that

I've been pretty curious about.

You know,

I know that you voted for Trump, and

that has at times been a very confounding choice for me.

Do you have,

I really just kind of want to hear more from you about what,

yeah, about just what's behind that.

Do you have a minute to talk, or we can chat later?

What do you think?

So, Monica,

as your uncle, I would love to have that talk.

If you're honestly curious, but if you're only having this conversation to change my mind,

it's not a good conversation to have.

But if you're honestly curious, I'd like to know how you arrived at things.

Totally.

But why don't we do, yeah, I just, I just want to ask you about you first.

Totally don't want to change your mind.

That's not a thing for me.

So,

yeah, cool.

Let's do it.

Okay.

You know, and then get a little cup of coffee, get a little cup of tea.

How many people do you stay a little?

How many people are you?

Because I've had this conversation with family members.

You know, and my family knows what I do for a living, and they, you know, they know

I'm pretty good at, you know, never get into an argument with a talk show host.

They're pretty good.

Good or good.

Especially if there's a commercial right around the corner.

They'll win.

But I've had this conversation, and we have come to great understandings.

How many people, though, will respond on either side?

Yeah.

If you're honest, if you're trying to make a point or win,

I don't want to have that conversation.

It doesn't work.

It absolutely doesn't work.

And the other thing is, you know, to go back to our scenario, if that's the first thing I've said to you in three years,

maybe not great.

Right.

Right.

Like.

But you could start it with, you could start it with, I miss you.

And I don't like this distance.

And

I don't know how.

You know, my father said to me once, I was about 30 years old, and

I said, Dad,

I don't know how to be your son.

I want to have a good relationship with you, but I don't know how to be your son.

And he said,

wow.

Well, let me be honest with you.

I don't know how to be your dad, but

if you will sit through the uncomfortable moments when I don't know what to say to you and you don't know what to say to me,

we will find our way to each other.

And it was the greatest gift of my life.

And

it's just, it's hard.

It is.

It is, but, but, but you can almost turn that around and say

it's so much easier because, well, it's worth it, but it's also so much easier because there's already a relationship there.

I mean, family is an extraordinary powerful thing, right?

Like people are born into families and they are different people.

Ideologically, different people, you know, and you don't know what you're going to get.

And so here you are, but you have these pre-existing relationships.

And at a time when in America, again, we're drawing apart so much.

It's like our family relationships where we can still connect across difference and we have that baseline

of love, frankly,

it's powerful.

So yeah, I mean, coming up to somebody and saying,

I don't know, I feel like maybe we're not connecting.

I don't know.

I have felt distant from you.

And I think I know a little bit why.

You know, I don't know what's going on with you.

But if you've got time, like, can we talk about it?

I do.

I miss you.

I miss you.

And I don't want you to feel like

I'm not thinking about you.

That would be a great phone call.

Wouldn't that be amazing?

And people do do it.

And that's what gives me hope, by the way.

I hear a lot of stories of people who do it.

We just don't share these stories.

We share the stories about how everything's on fire.

We don't share the stories

about people

putting the water on, people, yeah, people talking to each other.

It is happening.

We are tired of this.

We really are.

And there's just no one,

no matter what they believe, there's no one who likes this.

You know, not really.

Have you noticed, and maybe you can tell it from another side,

but i have noticed that uh i have so many i've called them for years strange bedfellows i have friendships with people a lot of friendships with people who are supposed to hate me or maybe have hated me in the past yeah and have then had some experience in their life where they've gone

Okay,

my side is kind of going crazy and I don't like that, but I don't like your side either.

But then they start talking because they have no one in their life.

They start talking and

you're like,

welcome home, you know?

Not every time, but welcome home.

There's so much we have in common.

Why have we let this divide us?

Are you seeing this?

Is that true?

Yes, yes, I am.

And again, it's just, it's a difficult thing to share and do publicly.

So we're not seeing it on those big platforms.

We're not seeing it there as much.

And then we're thinking, it's not happening.

It's happening.

It's happening.

We don't even know how to talk about it.

But yeah, and I've developed a lot of friendships with people all over the divide.

I've learned, I knew nothing really about libertarians until just a couple years ago.

Fascinating, fascinating kind of thinking.

Yeah,

it feels like it's complicated everything more, right?

Which may seem like, oh man, now you're probably worried about it more.

Now you just don't know what to think.

No, it's the opposite.

It's the opposite.

By seeing that something is a lot more complicated than I initially thought, and understanding that other people have completely different paths to that, different things that is at stake for them, it makes me realize we can do this.

But doesn't that

make the American idea, not what we're doing, but the idea of America make more sense?

Because the original idea, not that we've ever really mastered this, but the idea is

you do what you want, you believe what you want.

We just have these few things that are huge, and

these are the things that no government can tell man to do or not do, and that's it.

And then you want to be a libertarian, you want to, you know,

you know, make sure that nobody in your family is wearing their skirt above their ankles, and

you want to put a pin in your nose.

I don't really care.

I don't really care.

Doesn't it make it

the American idea of these people can find their way to each other and live next to each other if they're not telling each other what they have to do and believe?

Yeah, I mean, I think that's a powerful idea.

But of course, like where that meets its limit is that none of us are going to, none of us enjoy living in an America where we don't feel, I don't know, you know, secure, where we think something is a threat and we think the threat is our neighbors.

That's not, you know, that's where things get complicated there.

But that

changes if we start, that changes in two ways.

It's true if we don't have the same principles anymore.

And I mean the big ones, the big print, the Bill of Rights.

If we don't believe that a government should not spy on you, you know, and be able to take you to jail and not charge you or whatever, and that justice isn't blind, you know, that you don't have a right to free speech, those kinds of things.

If we don't believe those things anymore, then I don't think we have any, we have to come up with new things to unite on.

But if we have those things, we're fine.

Yeah, and I think that's fair, but I would say this.

It's like, it's too easy to say, here's my interpretation of the Bill of Rights.

And obviously, the Bill of Rights is quite clear.

I'm still.

Anyway,

here's how I see the Bill of Rights.

You, sir, have gone way off on this thing, and so we're not even going to talk.

That, I think, is actually dangerous.

Give me an example.

Because the only one that I think is not clear is the Second Amendment.

I mean, you can argue.

I think it's very clear, but you could argue about it.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and I'm not speaking from a place of, you know, wanting to, I'm not hugely on one side of the other.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's fine.

But really, really where I'm speaking from is that I think we just have to be open to the challenges of each moment.

Yes.

And I do think that right now in American history is an extraordinarily challenging time.

And it is only natural for us to question, to at least re-examine.

I shouldn't say question.

Well, maybe I do.

But re-examine our founding principles to ask ourselves, what did we assume we meant by this?

Do we need to, what's going on?

Do we need to reinterpret?

So that's the only thing that I think needs to happen.

And if some of us say what you're doing is already beyond the pale or anyone, talk to you, I think that that's actually dangerous.

So, even about the Bill of Rights.

Right, but I think, again, it's values put into tension, right?

So, it's free speech versus security, a long-standing debate where America has come on one side or the other many times before, and we'll continue to do it.

So, Monica, I think we actually really agree on this as long as we're having an honest conversation.

You know, calling one side,

calling people that are saying,

I want the Bill of Rights, that's what America is, is.

And the other side saying, these radicals, no, no, no, no, you've become the radical.

And you can think as radical thought as you want, but let's just have that conversation.

Look, I don't think these things work.

The world is changing.

So, okay, let's have that conversation and decide.

You know, that's why I really wanted Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz to run, because I really wanted to see

Bernie is very clear.

This is what I believe.

At least he used to be very clear.

This is what I believe.

Ted Cruz was very clear.

This is what I believe.

Great.

Let's have a sit-down, not a political game show,

and let's actually talk about it.

We have such a political game show.

Yeah.

It just, it's killing us.

And

it's actually killing us.

And you, being a tech person,

you know

the debate that we should be having is

what is life?

What is the role of a

machine that will think it's life?

What is the meaning of life?

Because if I can download you into a machine,

I don't and I think that's life, then I, why would I fight cancer?

These huge, crazy ideas are coming.

Should I be able to rearrange the genetic code so I have a super baby?

That's around the corner.

And if we can't,

that's going to be decided for us while we're arguing about this stuff.

You really, we've got to talk.

That's the thing.

Yeah, it's like we, we've got to talk.

We think that

we just think the enemy is what it isn't.

We've got to see that for me, the real enemy is the reality distortion fields all around us, making us more scared than we need to be of each other.

We don't need to be that scared of each other.

Thank you so much.

God bless you.

Thank you, Claire.

Thank you.

This was really fun.

Really fun.

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