TED Talks Daily - A journalist's trick for talking to people you can't stand | Joshua Johnson

Episode Date: August 3, 2026

Neutrality can get you through a tough conversation, but it rarely gets you anywhere. Joshua Johnson, actor/anchor for “The Onion” and former NPR host, makes the case instead for objectivity — parking your own opinions for a moment so you can focus on someone else’s story. He shares three quick ways to turn your most frustrating conversations into real understanding. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. Journalist and radio host Joshua Johnson has conducted hundreds of interviews, so he has learned quite a bit about how to talk to all kinds of people. Today, he has a piece of advice that might sound completely backwards for dealing with the people whose politics or values you might not agree with. When you consider someone problematic, there's a better way to deal with them, keep your sanity, and maybe even connect.

And it sounds insane. Move closer. Not to embrace them, but to explore them, like a doctor studying a sample. You need a microscope, not a telescope. In this talk, Joshua makes the case for closing the distance with the people you can't stand. Not to agree with them, but to understand how they came to believe what they believe. Like many journalists, myself included, Joshua has spent more than 12. 20 years moderating tough conversations.

He hosted the national talk show 1A on NPR, and he's trained in the art of neutrality. Johnson talks about how we're taught to park our opinions, flatten our emotions, and just get through the interview without rolling our eyes. For him, this worked for a long time, until he realized the distance it created was quietly costing something. My neutrality allowed me to interrogate his beliefs,

but the distance prevented me from seeing why he believed them. What if I had asked better questions? Like, who influenced you the most informing these views? Getting his story might have shown me him behind his canned arguments. Joshua makes the case for flipping the script

on the old journalist principle. He draws a sharp line between neutrality, which he says is really just pretending you have no opinions, and something he finds far more useful and far more vulnerable, at a time when polarization is on the rise. It's coming up right after a short break. And now our TED Talk of the day.

Idiots are everywhere. Some people drive you right up the wall with their opinions, their attitudes, their politics. I dealt with all kinds of people in my 20-plus years as a broadcast journalist. Eventually, I found moderating tough conversations with whatever kind of difficult people you just thought of, kind of simple to do. Not easy, but simple. The trick is to go somewhere I know you'd rather not be. Closer. Distance makes things worse. I came up in public radio, trained by old-school journalists

who taught me the art of neutrality. You neutralize your opinions, dead in your emotions, and you can get through most conversations without rolling your eyes. Generally, it worked, and it built me a strong reputation for fairness. But when the subject matter felt personal, neutrality felt phony. I used to host a national talk show on NPR called 1A,

and in one of our early programs, I interviewed a descendant of Confederate soldiers. He argued that Confederate monuments should be historically preserved. Now, as a black man, I felt enormous pressure to remain neutral, so I decided I was just going to focus on his arguments instead of on him. His logic felt kind of flimsy, and I called him on it, and eventually he just folded, and he said, it really doesn't matter what I say.

And the moment he said that I knew I had failed, I may have had a point, but I missed a huge opportunity to really do my job. See, my neutrality allowed me to interrogate his beliefs, but the distance prevented me from seeing why he believed them. What if I had asked better questions? Like, who influenced you the most informing these views? or suppose we let all of these monuments and statues stand just as they are.

What would that mean to you? Getting his story might have shown me him behind his canned arguments. Grilling him changed nothing. It felt pointless. When you consider someone problematic, there's a better way to deal with them, keep your sanity, and maybe even connect. And it sounds insane. Move closer.

not to embrace them, but to explore them, like a doctor studying a sample. You need a microscope, not a telescope. Doctors actually helped me learn this way before I became a journalist. As a teenager, I was part of a summer program for future doctors. Clearly, it worked. And I found myself working with clinicians studying cancer and thrombosis and HIV, very serious conditions.

I kind of naively expected them to be these crusading scientists, but they were just level-headed people doing their jobs. But there was a lesson in that level-headedness. See, I am not neutral about the cancers in our world, bigotry, hoaxes, political violence. I want them gone. However, as a journalist, I often had to deal with them in my clinic on the air. I survived it by getting as close to those problems as I could

and studying them like samples in a petri dish. In other words, I had to shift from neutral. Neutrality to objectivity. And no, they're not the same. Objectivity is just when you park your emotions and learn without judgment. I don't have to like it. I'm just here to learn from it. Neutrality negates your opinions, as if you have no judgments.

Does anyone here honestly believe I have no opinions on race? Right. Now, notice I said park your opinions. When you park your car, you don't abandon it in the garage. You're coming back for it. So you can choose when to focus inward on what you think or outward on what you can learn. Of course, sometimes your car ain't where you left it,

and maybe your opinions will move too. That maybe is why objectivity feels so vulnerable. That's why it works. That vulnerability is a sign of openness, and a conversation that's not open is pointless. But if you can stay open, amazing things can happen. Another time on NPR, I was interviewing a former Baltimore police officer

who would become this fiery advocate for law enforcement reform, and he was going on and on just a long rant in autopilot, just yunga yon. And I was trying to stay objective and listening as best I could when I thought I heard his voice waver just a little. And in that waiver, I detected more than his rage. It sounded like trauma. So near the end of the interview, I mentioned hesitantly

that he seemed traumatized by his experiences as a cop and could he reflect on that. He said, I put people in prison cells who are better people than me. Whoa. Sure enough, he went right back to his talking points, but it didn't matter because in that moment, that sliver of his story, his defenses dropped.

And he shifted from being right to being real. Look, some people are just difficult, but we can deal with them more simply. Here are three tips to get you started. First, get the story, particularly the key decisions and the turning points. What someone believes is not as important as how they chose to believe it.

Second, my NPR host pro tip, keep your questions short. Ten seconds tops. Long questions can feel like a setup or like you're rambling. And third, use that mental microscope. Look as closely as you can. Remember, you don't have to like it, but learn from it. It is time to reconnect, even to the people you can't stand.

But this time, we're going to make those connections count. You could learn a lot from an idiot, especially if you resolve never to act like one. I really appreciate y'all making time for me today. Thank you for listening. Bye, everybody. That was Joshua Johnson, speaking at TED 2026. If you're curious about TED's curation, visit TED.com slash curation guidelines.

And that's it for today. Ted Talks Daily is a podcast from TED. This episode was fact-checked by the TED Research Team and produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Lucy Little, Emma Tobner, and Tonzica, Sungmar-Nivon. Additional support from Daniela Ballerazo, Christopher Faisi, Bogan, Valentina Bohanini, Ban Ban-Bang, Brian Green, and Lainey Lot. Learn more at podcasts.com. I am Elise Hu.

I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feet. Thanks for listening.