TED Radio Hour - Listen Again: Finding Another Way

Episode Date: August 6, 2021

Original Broadcast Date: September 4, 2020. Conflict is a part of life. But in a polarized world, reaching a resolution is harder than ever. This hour, TED speakers explore creative and extraordinary ways of approaching conflict. Guests on the show include authors Shaka Senghor and Ebony Roberts, zoologist Lucy King, and radio journalist Jad Abumrad. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

Hey everybody, it's Manus here. And as much as I try to avoid it, conflict happens, like, all the time. From work to school to our personal relationships, conflict is a part of life. But sometimes the resolution isn't, you know, I'm right and you're wrong, or you win and I lose. And it's not about compromising either. Sometimes you need to find another way, get creative, and come up with a completely new path forward. This idea seems particularly relevant, given our state of affairs these days. So we want to bring you this one from the archives.

It's one of the team's favorite episodes. It's from last September, and it's called Finding Another Way. And it features Radio Great, Chad Abumrod. So I hope you enjoy it for the first time or enjoy it again. It has so many good lessons. And I'll see you back here again next week. Thanks as always for listening. This is the TED Radio Hour.

Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will see. surprise you. You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy?

And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading. From TED and NPR. I'm Minouche Zamoroti. On the show today, new ways of resolving conflict. Conflict in any relationship is inevitable. Let's not start with that. Let's start with romance. I just remember her walking in the room, and she just spoke with such passion and such

intelligence and thoughtfulness. And I knew I was attracted to her immediately. Our connection was crazy. It was a very deep, emotional connection, and we had so much in common. That's Shaka Senor and Ebony Roberts. Shaka and Ebony met 16 years ago while Shaka was in prison. I was serving what turned out to be a 19-year prison sentence, and I was an organizer inside prison. It was 2005, and Shaka organized an event for Black History Month.

Ebony was one of the speakers. Yeah, I remember meeting Shaka. Shaka was definitely unforgettable. So back to that moment. Sparks clearly fly. And then, like, what do you, how do you? How do you ask somebody out in prison? Like, how does that work?

How do you start dating? Well, Shaka, I think, Shaka didn't ask me out, but I think he did make the first move. Nah, I don't quite remember like that. I made the first move. Well, here's the thing. So after that program, I got a letter in the mail from Shaka. Very professional letter. Very professional letter.

Of course. Ebony didn't respond for a year. But then, after she did, the two started writing each other a lot. I hadn't found anybody that I connected with on both the social political level but also the emotional level. The beginning was just letters and we would write six, seven, eight page typed letters. And we kind of opened our hearts and shared so much of our lives with each other. And so I looked at him and I looked back at my experiences and relationships that I'd had. And I felt like he was worth the weight.

Shaka and Ebony made all kinds of plans for when he got out. Marriage, a family, a house. But when Shaka was released, the situation was far tougher than they'd expected. Like nothing prepares you for reenter society after being gone for two decades. and nothing prepares you for taking a leap of being in an adult relationship when your only experience was being in relationships when you were a kid. I had multiple things that I had to come to terms with. You know, I was not just coming home to a relationship. I'm also a parent to two children who were entering adulthood, reconnected with my family, trying to find employment,

understanding early on that I still had PTSD from two decades ago. And so it was kind of like I was driving on in seven lanes of traffic. Meanwhile, Evie and I, we were on kind of the one-way role to love, right? But I had all these other things that I was processing in real time. And so it was just a lot. You know, it was a great undertaking to come home and that transition. is really tough. Yeah, he came home in 2010, which was shortly after the Great Recession.

So the housing bubble led me to lose the home that I had and the home that he was supposed to come home to. So he came home in 2010, and by the time he came home, the house was in foreclosure. And within a year, we... had to move. Can I just say as someone who's been married for 15 years, relationships are hard enough without a recession, PTSD, foreclosure, other family. I mean, the list that you, I mean, the odds were completely stacked against you. And so I have to ask at what point were you like, let's actually add a child to this equation. Well,

We didn't plan that out. No, we didn't plan that out. But it happened. And we were both excited when we found out I was pregnant. I was so excited when Ebony told me she was pregnant. You know, I wanted to be present in all of the things, the whole process. And so we did the breathing classes and the doctor's visits and, I mean, everything. You know, I remember taking our life.

little office that we had put together and converting that into a nursery and just how amazing it felt to know we were going to be welcoming life into the world. So yeah, so I mean, I was just excited. I was excited. I was nervous. I mean, I was afraid. There were times where I was just like questioning like, damn, like the timing. Employment was tough. You know, I was hustling books out the trunk of the car and, you know, getting a little speaking engagements here and there, but it wasn't like any significant amount of money coming in. And we were okay. We were surviving the day to day.

But in a tough economy, adding a baby to it was really scary. I think one of our first conflicts was actually around the anxiety that shock ahead about being a father and being able to provide. I had a good paying job, but I was the primary breadwinner. And so he felt a lot of pressure. to provide. And the conflict arose because I was like, I got this. You know, I've got a job. I've got benefits. We're going to be okay. And that wasn't sufficient as a man. He felt like, no, I've got to get a job. I've got to be able to provide. And so he did not. I think, I don't know if we've ever talked about this, Shaka, but I think he felt emasculated because I was like, I got this. Don't worry. And I felt

I was trying to be, you know, compassionate and understanding, and he felt like that I was, you know, didn't need him. No, I never, I never felt emasculated. I'm just a very driven person. And I'm used to taking care of people around me. So it wasn't necessarily about emasculation. It was like, you know, I've already failed in my responsibility with two children by abandoning them with my incarceration. And now here it is. we have a child on the way and I'm not being able to handle things according to the standards that

I have envisioned for myself as a dad. You know, I grew up in a household where there were constant complaints about working check to check. And like, that wasn't a vision for I have, that I had for myself. So it wasn't that I felt emasculated. It was just I felt purposeful and more driven to not create the same cycle that was playing out not only in our family, but in our community. We had been arguing quite a bit, and we tried to fix the problems that we had in our relationship, but we hadn't gone to therapy. We really hadn't done any of the work that we needed to do to handle a address the problems that we had. And there was just so much resentment.

And so we reached a point where we decided that, you know, we were better apart than we were together. Conflict is a part of life. But how do we find peaceful ways to work through our differences, whether that's as a family or an entire country? We're living in a polarized world and conflicting perspectives. divide us to the point that reconciliation can feel nearly impossible.

But what if instead of merely tolerating each other, we found better ways to exist together? And so on the show today, new ways of resolving conflict, in nature, in ourselves, and in our relationships. Ebony and Shaka decided to split up after nearly a decade together, but they weren't ready to give up on being a family with their son, Sayku. We had both dreamed of a happily ever after and, you know, having, you know, sort of a model black family that was really important to us because so many black families are fractured, including our own. So it was a really difficult decision, but it was so toxic at that point.

And I think we had tried and failed so many times to address the issues on our own. And I think that we were just tired. I'll speak for myself. I was tired. And there was a point, and Shaka can speak to this, where he kind of checked out. And when one person in a relationship checks out, it's really hard to continue trying to work on a relationship. And so we just reached a point where we realized that it wasn't going to work in the current dynamic. Yeah, yeah, I had checked out during that time.

And I think the other part that was really an important part of the decision is seeing the effects that our disagreements and our arguments were having on say cool and knowing that neither of us wanted to recreate terrible childhood memories that we had both endured in our own different ways and being very intentional about protecting him from the madness of our adult lives. And so it was tough. You know, it's like we got nine years invested. We had been through every type of challenge while I was incarcerated. We had been through challenges post-incarceration. But despite that, it still was tearing apart something that we had put so much work, energy, and effort into building together. But we knew for the best interest of our son that we had to make the right decision. Our breakup hit me really hard.

Ebony Roberts continues from the TED stage. But I decided I wouldn't let my broken heart get in the way of what was best for Saku. We struggled initially trying to navigate this new space as co-parents. I asked myself, how do we raise this beautiful boy full of wonder and promise and so much power in spite of our failures as a couple? The answer for me was simple. I could either choose fear, fear of being alone, fear of the unknown, or choose love. And I chose love. It means seeing the good in you as a father and not your missteps as a partner.

It means putting Seku first every time, even if it means I don't get my way. I wanted Seku to know what it was like to see two parents who got along two parents who worked together as a team. I wanted him to know what love looks like in its truest form. In a minute, how Shaka and Ebony are building a new kind of family and raising their son together. I'm Anoush Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Stay with us.

It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zomeroati. On the show today, new ways of resolving conflict. We were just hearing from Shaka Sangor and Ebony Roberts talking about their decision to end their relationship after nine years together. But they didn't want to break up their family. And so they chose to create a new parenting agreement to be partners in a new way for the sake of their son, Seiku. For us, co-parenting is so much more than scheduling pick up and drop off, play days, deciding what he's going to wear. it's going to eat. For us, it's about helping each other carry the way. Unpack the low,

and to show up in the world and the way that honors the beauty of our son. We never thought we be here, but here we are. And we hope that the way that we show up for Seku and for each other is a model of what successful co-parenting can look like. So can the two of you help me understand how your version of co-parenting, this new kind of putting the friendship first, what that looks like on a daily basis. You know, I think our relationship as co-parents or as parents really deepened, actually, when our relationship ended. Because I think we were both able to communicate better about say, whose needs and really see this as a partnership. We talk about single parenthood, particularly single mothers. And while I am not married, I am not a single mother. I don't raise

Seku alone. I have a partner. And so, you know, if I'm having a hard day and I'm going through something with Seku, I come to him and say, this is a situation. What do you think? Did I handle this properly? And I can go to a friend. I can go to someone in my family and ask for advice. But I have the one other person that I know cares about and love Seku as much as I do. Yeah, I agree. I mean, For us, you know, we centered him like he's just such a beautiful soul. And there's no drop off. When he's here with me, there's no drop off in terms of expectations of love and honoring his mom and making sure he calls his mom and does prayer at night. And whenever we spend time together, you know, he's always like group hug.

But it also feels good to know that we can create this bond of love that's just, unbreakable. Our parenting can be seen as an allegory, but it's too sad to coin the possibilities. On one side, the reality of raising a black boy in a society that says that black boys, black bodies, and black lives only seen as profitable or disposable.

And then there's the other side. The possibility of two parents who are no longer together coexisting. coexisting, supporting each other, loving each other, showing affection publicly in a way that honors the relationship with our son. And even more importantly, is the power to support each other in those vulnerable moments. When you tell other parents who are split up about how you, the two of you, are parenting together, despite not being a couple, what do they want to know? I'm guessing they must have, like, questions about how you make it work. Yeah, I get a lot of questions from my friends who are incredible fathers, actually.

Like, how do you put the anger, the resentment, the ego? How do you put those things to the side? And what I always just really talk to them about is, like, how would you want to feel it as a child? What do your peers want to know, Epney? What are they confused about with your relationship with Shaka? Most people are confused about why we're not together. That's been an impediment to my dating life, by the way.

You know, I have to tell people that I can love Shaka and respect who he is as a man and a father and know that we're better as co-parents and not as romantic partners and be okay with that. And oftentimes we go straight to the petty Because oftentimes we're operating from a place of hurt And so I just try to, you know, show people by example I could respond with pettiness or I can't respond out of love. Is there an example you're thinking of Ebony? Because you sound so virtuous right now

But I'm guessing there must have been a moment where you were like, oh my God, I'm careful of you to do, but you had to put it aside. I'm trying to think of... I can tell you all the petty moments. Oh, go ahead. Go right ahead. Go right here. God, I can't think of one.

I'm serious. We've had our conflicts, and we've had moments where we weren't kind or thoughtful. I think the thing that has worked is we know giving each other a little bit space. We're going to arrive at the right conclusion, an apology would be forthcoming. But talking to each other, like, that's been our superpower for me. And, you know, I want to add, you know, it's been a struggle to not say something to Shaka in moments when I wanted to, and I had a good friend who told me, you can't control what happens at his house. And he's his dad, and I know he has his best interest. And that has been something that I'm still learning to do, but, you know, I think I've gotten a lot better at that. that. I have learned so much from this conversation and it really is what makes me want to ask this last

question to each of you, which is, you know, we're living in extremely toxic times. But I want to believe that there's something that applies from all the ways that you've described that you came together in a new way. Please tell me that there is something that applies to the the rift that is in the United States right now. I'll say one of the reasons that I believe that we have, the rift that we have in the country, is because we haven't been honest about what people's real lived experiences has been. And one of the things I learned in my own healing is that you can't fix the things that you're unwilling to acknowledge.

And as a country, when you think about the racial dynamics, you think about the economic disparities, it's larger because nobody has had the courage to actually acknowledge the way that policies and the way that social norms have been harmful to a large segment of society. And until we get to a space where we can be honest about all of the things, we can't fix any other things. You know, I think, um, what makes our relationship work and what has made it work from the beginning is compassion. And that's what's needed in our country. And sometimes it's hard to show compassion to someone that we don't love.

But we have to show compassion in every everyday acts, you know, whether it's with our children or with this, whether it's on the road with someone who's, you know, cut us off. You know, we just have to get out of our own head, out of our own space. and think about the other person. That's Ebony Roberts and Shaka Sangor. You can see their full talk at TED.com. On the show today, resolving conflict in a different kind of relationship. Between two species that have lived side by side for thousands of years,

humans and the world's largest land animal. So I love elephants, but they are a seven-ton, three-year. a half meter tall, huge paciderm, and they can be incredibly terrifying, particularly coming at you through the dark at nighttime, when your only refuge is a mud hut. This is zoologist Lucy King. She works in Kenya with the group Save the Elephants. To have an elephant come to you in the dark like that is something you really can't understand until you've been there. We've had farmers who've had the roofs of their mud huts ripped off in the night and had elephants reach in with their trunk and grab food or water that was inside the

hut. Now, you can't imagine what that must be like having your kids held away from a trunk searching in the dark. You have no electricity. You have absolutely no way of getting out, because if you left your hut, you'd be walking into an elephant herd. And you can't find your torch, and it's really very, very scary. Lucy says this type of confrontation between people and elephants used to be pretty rare. Here she is on the TED stage. It was only as recently as the 1970s that we used to have 1.2 million elephants roaming across Africa. Today, we're edging closer to only having 400,000 left. And at the same time period, the human population has quadrupled, and the land is being fragmented at such a pace that it's

really hard to keep up with. Too often, these migrating elephants end up stuck inside communities looking for food and water, but ending up breaking open water tanks, breaking pipes, and of course breaking into food stores for food. These elephants also trample and eat crops, and this is traditionally eroding away that tolerance that people used to have for elephants. And sadly, we're losing these animals by the day, and in some countries, by the hour. So basically, the root of this conflict is a struggle for space and resource. Yeah. Mostly because more people are becoming sedentary and more people are on the lower end of the economic scale. So more and more people are having to be subsistence farmers to grow their

own food. So we're talking people who have an acre to five acres of land. They're scratching a living off this land to try and keep themselves going. And if an elephant comes onto a plot of land of that size, they can finish a crop in one night. So you end up having a farm absolutely destroyed and these farmers get very, very desperate, desperate enough to injure or potentially kill the elephant to keep them out of their community. And what about the other way around, will elephants injure or kill humans? Very sadly, yes, if an elephant starts to be feeling very threatened, and by this, I mean people coming at them through the bush, shouting at them, throwing things at them, you know, trying to distract them from the crops when they're driven by a need to eat that crop, it can turn very violent, very quickly. Elephants have picked up people and literally hurled them across the floor and just broken them. So it can be very aggressive and very, very scary for everyone involved.

So it's a big challenge in a really difficult cycle to break. You have to provide a solution to that. And only then can you turn it into more of a coexistence and tolerance. So you wrote your entire PhD about this and you actually found a solution, one that does and hurt the farmers or the elephants. So we based this whole study on this Kenyan folklore, that elephants wouldn't go near trees, which had beehives in them. So I studied this. I put beehives in trees.

I waited for the bees to come, and I would watch and record where the elephants would come anywhere near them. And I did one day come across a beehive I had put in a tree, which had a huge swarm of bees in. It was right at the top of the tree. And it was in the middle of the day, and it was very hot. So the bees weren't actually doing very much. there was one or two flying in and out, and I saw these elephants resting underneath the occupied

beehive. And I was totally distraught, and I thought, well, this is the end of my PhD. They're not scared of bees. This is a disaster. And then, of course, we realized that nothing was disturbing anyone. So the bees didn't need to sting the elephant. The bees weren't doing anything. So we decided to throw a stone at the beehive and see if we could disturb the bees. So my amazing field assistant picked up a stone and threw it at this occupied hive. luckily the stone didn't hit the elephants on the way down. It kind of zinged off into the bush, but the hive got knocked by the stone and erupted.

And the elephants just ran for their lives. You did it. You proved that the folklore was true, that elephants are indeed terrified of bees. What went through your mind? It was just one of those eureka moments of seeing those elephants running away from really disturbed bees. And I just kept thinking, well, this is it.

if we connect the hives to each other or to some kind of system that, when triggered, causes a swinging sensation, the hives will shake and release the bees that are inside and the bees will come out and sting the elephants, or at least chase them away with the buzzing sound and the smell of honey. An elephant, I mean, has pretty thick skin, though. Why are they so afraid of bees? Yeah, it is extraordinary. They have very thick skins.

It can be over two centimeters thick on many parts of their body. but they also have a lot of thin, very vulnerable skin, and that is around the watery areas. So bees are also attracted to water. So around the eyes, the skin is very thin, in the trunk, at the tip of the trunk, which is quite watery, it constantly drips and has a lot of secretions. And behind the ears, the skin is very, very thin.

So we know that bees can sting in those very thin-skinned areas. And we've seen elephants that have been stung, and sure enough, their eyes do swell up. So they probably will never forget that sound. and then the pain of it afterwards, and then the negative sensation of your skin swelling. So we're pretty sure that this is something they learn during their 30, 40, 50-year lifespan.

And then, of course, they teach their young ones to stay away from that sound as well because they know that that sound leads to this pain of a sting. I've done this experiment many, many times, and the elephants almost always flee. Not only do they run away, but they dust themselves as they're running as if to knock bees out of these.

air. And we placed infrasonic microphones around the elephants as we did these experiments, and it turns out they're communicating to each other in infrasonic rumbles to warn each other of the threat of bees and to stay away from the area. This led me to invent a novel design for a beehive fence, which we are now building around small one-to-two-acre farms on the most vulnerable frontline areas of Africa air where humans and elephants are competing for space. These beehive fences are very, very simple. We use 12 beehives and 12 dummy hives to protect one acre of farmland, basically tricking the elephants into thinking there are more beehives than there really are. And of course, it literally halves the cost of the fence. They're held up by posts with a

shade roof to protect the bees, and they're interconnected with a simple piece of plain wire, which goes all the way around connecting the hives. So if an elephant tries to enter the farm, he will avoid the beehive at all cost, but he might try and push through between the hives. in the dummy hive, causing all the beehives to swing as the wire hits his chest. And as we know from our research work, this will cause the elephants to flee and run away and hopefully remember not to come back to that risky area. I mean, Lucy, it's kind of incredible that there was an surprisingly simple solution that turned out to be a win for everyone that nature had the answer to finding away for humans

and elephants to coexist. I agree. And I think humans have a tendency to over-technicalize everything. and to just find a problem and then just go, right, can we create an app to solve that? Or can we build a bigger wall or design a better electric fence or what can we do? And I just think we need to stop for a bit and think that nature has so many of these solutions. And how do people live before with us? And how have elephants not destroyed every tree or every house in the past? So I think it's just, if that's one thing I can say,

we can use this story as a case study to just help us all take a step back. and start to think a bit more naturally and a bit more holistically about some of these problems and to try and not turn it into some sort of expensive technological results. There are wonderful examples of innovation and ideas coming out from just thinking laterally around this problem. And in the elephant world, one of the other major things that's being used is the growth and use of chilies. Elephants don't like chilies either. So you can grow hot chilies. You can either grow them around your farm or you can dry them in.

crush them into chili powder and mix them into dung and you can burn those dung piles filled with chili and the smoke is so accurate that the elephants run away from the smoke. And so I think we've got to use solutions like this more and more if we're going to move forward with a natural and healthy world. If a beehive fence can be one of those pieces in the jigsaw to help, then that's going to be the piece of the jigsaw I'm going to work on, probably for the rest of my life. That's zoologist Lucy King. And by the way, her team has installed about 8,000 of her beehive fences around the world. You can find her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, new ways of resolving conflict.

I'm Manushe Zamoroti, and you're listening to the TED Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manushe Zamoroti. And on the show today, new ways of resolving conflict. We've talked about conflicts in relationships, conflicts in nature, and now we want to turn to conflicts in politics and perspective. Given that we live in a country that is extremely divided and where we just seem to have lost the simple ability to speak across difference,

I really do feel like figuring out how to bridge different realities is the work. This is Chad Abelmrod. I host stuff. I host some things. Jad's probably best known for Radio Lab, the show he created in 2002. But before we get to his new understanding of how we can resolve conflict, let's go back to how Jad first started telling stories. Initially, the idea was just to tell stories about complicated things where you find beauty and meaning in those things.

And at that point, mostly that meant science. After several years of telling stories about science, Janet felt things were getting repetitive. Essentially, every story, I developed this kind of template where you go off and you explore the known universe and you interview a scientist or something. Congregations of fireflies along riverbanks in Southeast Asia and Malaysia or Thailand. And then you slowly lead your audience to this moment of wonder.

All flashing in sync like a Christmas tree. And it's that precise moment when the music comes in and you say the cosmic thing. It's one of the most hypnotic and spellbinding spectacles in nature. And everybody just goes, Wow. Wow. Wow.

That's amazing. Whoa. And that became the move. That became the thing that I tried to do every story, every show. But it all felt so hermetically sealed in some way, kept away from the messiness of the world. Yeah. I guess like most stories aren't completely simplistic, right?

Yeah. And I also was running into stories that challenged the idea that science is the only way to know the world. Mm-hmm. You know, there were stories that I bumped into where people just disagreed with the science or the truth that was in the room at that moment. You could express it scientifically, but there was a much deeper truth hiding right behind that. And so when I say I got tired of the wonder stuff, it wasn't. It wasn't that I didn't want to do that anymore. It's just that I felt like that was actually a smaller piece of a larger mission. And so you made a change, right? Like from stories that evoked awe to stories that were really all about conflict.

Yeah. But you had a problem with that, too. There was one episode, I think, that kind of summed it up for you. Yeah. I mean, it was an episode that I think this was 2012. we ended up investigating the idea that post-Fietnam, the Soviet Union, used chemical weapons on the Hmong villagers in the mountains of Laos. So it was this really perilous moment. And so we ended up speaking to a guy who was there and claimed that chemical weapons had been used on him and his fellow villagers and a lot of people died. And it was a horrible situation. The problem was that some Western scientists went there and measured to see if there were, in fact, chemical weapons being used, didn't find any chemical weapons.

And then basically figured out, I mean, I should call it a theory, I guess, that in fact, what was being mistaken as chemical weapons was bee poop. Pollin, basically. That was the theory. That was what the Western scientists said. my co-host Robert Krollwich was talking to this fellow asking him, did you see the stuff? Did the source of the rain? Can you firsthand account for the fact that this came from planes? Was there always a plane and then rain?

And the guy couldn't, but he said, I know what the scientists say and they're wrong, because I know what I experienced. I speak to what I've seen, and there is no inkling in my mind. There was chemicals that were killing my people. This went back and forth and back and forth for a long, long while.

But he himself is not clear whether it's the bee stuff or whether it... It feels to him like this is a semantic debate. And then it just... The interview ended badly. There's a sad lack of justice. That the word of a man who survived this thing must be pitted against a professor from Harvard who's read these accounts. But as far as I can tell, your uncle didn't see the bee pollen fall. your uncle didn't see a plane.

All of this is hearsay. My uncle says, for the last 20 years, he didn't know that anybody was interested in the death of the Hmong people. He agreed to do this interview because you were interested. You know what happened to the Hmong happened? And what we know has been questioned again and again is not a surprise to him. to me. I think

that, I think the interview is done. I felt horrible. Chad continues his story in his TED Talk. Like hammering at a scientific truth when someone has suffered, that wasn't going to heal anything.

And maybe I was relying too much on science to find the truth. And it really did feel at that moment that there were a lot of truths in the room and we were only looking at one of them. It was one of those like 90-minute conversations that ended up getting edited down to

three minutes. And in those three minutes, it looked like we bullied the guy. And I feel like we kind of did, to be honest. I don't think we did it right on a number of levels. So I thought, I got to get better at this. And so for the next eight years,

I committed myself to doing stories where you heard truths collide. We did stories. about the politics of consent. You heard the perspective of survivors and perpetrators whose narratives clash. We did stories about race. How black men are systematically eliminated from juries? And yet the rules that try and prevent that from happening only make things worse.

Stories about counterterrorism, Guantanamo detainees. Stories where everything is disputed. All you can do is struggle to try and make sense. And the struggle kind of became the point. I began to think maybe that's my job to lead people to moments of struggle. Because truth is no longer just a set of facts to be captured. It's become a process. It's gone from being a noun to being a verb.

Increasingly in this confusing world, we need to be the bridge between those differences. But how do you do that? How do you end that story? So, Jed, you have some epiphanies along the way in your career, and you realize that you do want to tell stories about conflict, But you also realize that you can't just end those stories without some kind of resolution. How did you discover that? And, I mean, how did you know if that was even possible?

Yeah, I mean, it's kind of a weird genesis story. So this is what brings me to Dolly, or St. Dolly, as we like to call her in the South. I want to tell you about one little glimmer of an epiphany that I had doing a nine-part series called Dolly Partons America last year. It was a bit of a departure for me, but I just had this intuition that Dolly could help me figure out this ending problem. And here was the basic intuition. You go to a Dolly concert. You see men in trucker hats standing next to men in drag. Democrats standing next to Republicans. Women holding hands, every different kind of person smashed together. All of these people that we are told should hate each other are there singing together.

She somehow carved out this unique space in America. And I wanted to know how did she do that? Okay, so you and Dolly Parton, talk to me about how you came together. So the Dolly Project for me started in 2016, and this is at a moment when the presidential election is heating up. Yep. The last one, obviously. And it was getting really gnarly. So I pitched her on a thing. And initially that thing was just like, let me just interview you.

But it just ended up becoming a much bigger project where it was really a really. the story of America as seen through Dolly, her life was an interesting study in how to cut across differences which you could think were fixed. But somehow she embraces them all. Most of the time for better and sometimes for worse. It was just an extended dialogue in difference for me. That's what the whole series was about. I mean, over and over again, she would force me beyond the simple categories. had constructed for the world.

I remember talking with her about her seven-year partnership with Porter Wagner. I look forward to having you around a long, long time. Well, I hope to be. Thank you, very much. She joins his band. He is the biggest thing in country music. He had one hit record after another.

Thank you. She is a backup singer, a nobody. New in Nashville at the time. Within a short time, she gets huge. Pretty Miss Dolly Park. He gets jealous. He then sues her for $3 million when she tries to leave. And so I was asking her a lot of questions about the middle part of their partnership when things started to go bad.

And the assumption of my questions was he was a type. He was like a patriarchal type of person who was preventing her from being who she was destined to be. This is a guy. I mean, you see it in the videos too. He's got his arm around you. There's a power thing happening for sure. Well, it's more complicated than that. And it was really interesting to me that she never, ever bought the assumption.

It's just, I mean, just think about it. He had had this show for years. He had, he didn't need me to have his hit show. He wasn't expecting me to be all that I was either. I mean, he, he didn't know how many dreams I had. And she was like, you can't summarize this relationship. There was power. There were all these other things happening.

But there was also a lot of love. There was a lot of affection. There was a lot of musical chemistry. So don't just pretend it was one thing. Porter and I had a love-hate relationship. You could never untangle all of that. So, like, she constantly would push back against those moments for me. Like, I think about that conversation all the time.

Because she would do this thing where she would, in the same moment, advocate for herself. And she'd also show great empathy for the other. Who knows? Had it not been for Porter, I may not be sitting right here in this chair right now. You know, I'd like to believe I would have made it. But if I'd have stayed forever, I might have missed my chance. I mean, that's what the song I Will Always Love You is about. It's about I'm leaving you because I need to go do my thing.

But I can see how much hurt that's going to cause. I'm going to hold it all. I'm going to hold my ambition. And I'm going to hold your loss. And so there's something about Dolly that she's able to do both those things at once. She never compromises herself, but she never throws someone out in the process. I have a theory that one of the reasons that you can have the crazy broad appeal that you have into so many different communities that normally hate each other is because of those acts of forgiveness.

Does that vibe with you? Yeah, that I, forgiveness. And forgiveness is all there is. Okay, so you realize this remarkable capacity for empathy in Dolly. And where does that take you? Like, what does that mean for you and your work? Yeah. So, I mean, in the wake of Dolly, all of these thoughts were sort of swirling in my mind.

And it was as I was thinking about all this stuff that a very good friend of mine gave me a book. It's a book by a woman named Jessica Benjamin. And the book is called Beyond Doer and Done Too. And it's sort of like the psychology of human relationships, right? And we sometimes see ourselves as these like autonomous units. Like I do something to you, Manus, and you take it in and then you do something to me. And it's this very transactional thing. But Jessica Benjamin's idea is that when two people come together and they're both open

and they're both willing to sort of face each other and really recognize each other, take each other in, listen, struggle together. In that mutual engagement, the relationship between them is actually a separate entity. So it's almost as if magically these two people create a separate third space. And there was something about that idea that just like unlocked everything from me. I mean, Chad, I think for a lot of people, this brings up marriage or even like a corporation. the idea that people have to compromise for the sake of an institution or an organization. But that is not what you're saying.

You are saying that people don't have to settle. They need to create something new. Yeah, because I hate the idea of common ground, that common ground thing that we say as journalist, as if there's like some, like you take two people who couldn't be more different and you want to assume that there's some thing that they share, which usually means they both have to dumb themselves down in order to find the most basic thing that they share. What's more interesting to me is when two people who are very, very different

come together, they make something. So it's not something to discover, it's something to create, right? That feels way more interesting to me. Like that then becomes a little bit like an ephemeral third space. Like with Dolly's concerts, right? Totally.

Like, is that being, the place. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot to that because everybody is welcome at a Dolly show. It's an ethical decision that she has made in her life, which is she'll not cast anyone out. And there are times, frankly, when I'm like disappointed by that, you know, there are elements of the country music audience that I think should be thrown the hell out, but she won't do it. Like, she is radically open. And I think she communicates that to her audience. And the way that she sees them and the way they see her back, it actually creates that third space, which is a real space.

It's the physical architecture of her concerts, spiritual architecture of her concerts. So, Jad, did you figure it out? Like, you know now your mission as a storyteller? Yeah, yeah, but maybe. For me, it has something to do with, modeling the struggle that one has to go through to bridge those realities or to see them evolve into something new, right? That for me feels like the target. That's what I want to happen in every story, is to get to that third.

That's what I think my job is now. That's Chad Abamrod. He's the host and creator of Radio Lab, More Perfect, and Dali Parton's America. You can see his full talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week about new ways of resolving conflict. To learn more about the people who were on it, go to ted.npr.org. And to see hundreds more TED talks, check out TED.com or the TED app. Our TED Radio production staff at NPR includes Jeff Rogers, Sanaz-Meshkampur, Rachel Faulkner,

Diba Motisham, James Delahousie, J.C. Howard, Katie Montalione, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Christina Kala, and Matthew Cloutier. Our theme music was written by Romteen, Arablewey. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelin, and Michelle Quint. I'm Manoosh Zamoroti, and you've been listening to The TED Radio Hour from NPR.