TED Talks Daily - Reducing toxic polarization – one conversation at a time | Dave Isay

Episode Date: July 7, 2024

For the past 20 years StoryCorps has been traveling the country gathering the stories and wisdom of ordinary Americans and archiving them at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps founder Dave Isay — winner of the 2015 TED Prize — has created an unprecedented document of the dreams and fears that touch us all. In an interview with Elise, Dave shares about a new project, One Small Step, which aims to help reduce toxic polarization – one conversation at a time. 

TED Audio Collective. You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Today, something a little different than our usual Sunday programming. This is a very special episode with Dave Isay, the founder and president of StoryCorps. For the past 20 years, StoryCorps has been traveling the country gathering the stories and wisdom of ordinary Americans and archiving them at the Library of Congress. Today we're going to hear about StoryCorps' new project to help reduce toxic polarization

in the United States, one conversation at a time. Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home

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See store manager for details. But first, a little background. Dave has been part of the Ted family for nearly a decade. In 2015, he was awarded the Ted Prize and gave a pretty popular talk on the Ted stage. Here's an excerpt. Tonight, I'm going to try to make the case that inviting a loved one, a friend, or even a stranger to record a meaningful interview with you just might turn out to be one of the most important moments in that person's life and in yours.

When I was 22 years old, I was lucky enough to find my calling when I fell into making radio stories. Recording these interviews, I saw how the microphone gave me the license to go places I otherwise never would have gone and talk to people I might not otherwise ever have spoken to. And it changed my life.

Over and over again, I'd see how the simple act of being interviewed could mean so much to people, particularly those who'd been told that their stories didn't matter. Traditionally, broadcast documentary has been about recording interviews to create a work of art or entertainment or education that's seen or heard by a whole lot of people. But I wanted to try something where the interview itself

was the purpose of this work, and see if we could give many, many, many people the chance to be listened to in this way. So we built a booth, where anyone can come to honor someone else by interviewing them about their life. I had no idea if it would work, but from the very beginning, it did.

People treated the experience with incredible respect and amazing conversations happened inside. It's now the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered. We've hired and trained hundreds of facilitators to help guide people through the experience. Most serve a year or two with StoryCorps, traveling the country, gathering the wisdom of humanity. And if you ask them, all of the facilitators will tell you that the most important thing they've learned from being present during these interviews

is that people are basically good. I've also learned so much from these interviews. I've learned about the poetry and the wisdom and the grace that can be found in the words of people all around us when we simply take the time to listen. Like this interview between a betting clerk in Brooklyn named Danny Peraza, who brought his wife Annie to StoryCorps to talk about his love for her. You see, the thing of it is, I always feel guilty when I say I love you to you.

And I say it so often. I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am, it's coming from me. It's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio. And it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house. If I don't have a note on the kitchen table, I think there's something wrong. You write a love letter to me every morning. The only thing that could possibly be wrong is I couldn't find a silly pen. To my princess, the weather out today is extremely

rainy. I'll call you at 11.20 in the morning. It's a romantic weather report. And I love you, I love you, I love you. When a guy is happily married, no matter what happens at work, no matter what happens in the rest of the day, there's a shelter when you get home. There's a knowledge, knowing that you can hug somebody without them throwing you downstairs and saying, get your hands off me. Being married is like having a color television set. You never want to go back to black and white. Danny Peraza had more romance in his little pinky than all of Hollywood's leading men put together.

At this moment, when so much of how we communicate is fleeting and inconsequential, join us in creating this digital archive of conversations that are enduring and important. And maybe in doing so, we'll learn to listen a little more and shout a little less. Maybe these conversations will remind us what's really important. And maybe, just maybe, it will help us recognize that simple truth that every life, every single life, matters equally and infinitely. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Dave Isay is with me now to talk about his latest project called One Small Step. It was inspired by what he learned over the last 20 years at StoryCorps. Okay, Dave, tell me about One Small Step. What are you trying to do with this initiative? Sure. So I was lucky enough to win the TED Prize in 2015. And it was about at that time that I started becoming concerned about toxic polarization in the country, not the fact that we argue with each other, which is healthy and great, but what happens when we can't see each other as human beings across the political divides?

So our Hippocratic oath at StoryCorps is to do no harm to participants. So we spent years and years developing a new method of doing StoryCorps. All of the interviews up until we started One Small Step had been between people who know and love each other. And we started putting strangers together across the political divide, not to talk about politics, but just to get to know each other as human beings under the truth that it's hard to hate up close. We tested for years and launched in four cities about two years ago and continued testing. And we're getting ready to take it national in the lead up to the elections in the US when polarization in this country is at an all-time high. Polarization is something we talk a lot about here at TED. But

before we get to what to do to bridge these divides, what do you see as the cause of these deep divisions in America in the first place? Well, again, it's not necessarily the divisions that we're concerned about. It's what happens when we start dehumanizing people across the divides. And that's very dangerous. And we know what that can lead to. I mean, you look at Rwanda or you look at Nazi Germany, and that's the effect of deeply toxic polarization. And I think there are a lot of reasons why this has happened.

I think social media has been a big driver of this. The loudest, angriest voices are the ones that get shared the most because our brains are trained to watch out for dangerous things. And tweets that tell us that things are dangerous lights up our brain a little bit. So that's part of why this has happened. And our country has gotten much more polarized since we started working on One Small Step. The statistics are pretty grim. You know, four in five voters now describe the other side as hateful in the U.S. and brainwashed. Only one in 10 regard people with different politics from theirs as reasonable.

And about half the country thinks it's likely we'll see a civil war in our lifetime. It's wild. So what could One Small step conversations do to help? Well, you know, these are conversations between two strangers who sign up to participate. And we have done thousands and thousands of these so far and almost to a person. And it kind of belies belief given everything we see and hear on the media about the two sides. But people come in a little bit nervous and they often come out friends. So it's really to begin building a little bit of social capital between people, a little bit of trust so that we can talk to each other and see each other again as human beings. We're told that the other side is completely crazy and totally different from us. But when

you actually sit down and talk to people, they're much more similar than you might expect. Let's listen now to an excerpt of one of those conversations. This is Cassandra, a liberal, and David, who is conservative. They spoke in Birmingham, Alabama. Let me ask you this. When you read my bio, what did you think? So the first part, my mind kicked into stereotype. She's probably died in a world Democrat. End of story. Second part was intriguing because you said something along the lines of an open mind.

I thought, well, this would be interesting. When I read your bio, I just thought you were a white man. I thought I was going to come in here and just... I don't even know what it was. I don't even remember what it was. And that's what's so interesting to me is that I'm just like... That's exactly right. So I have to admit it. And I appreciate you receiving that and allowing me to admit my stereotype.

Because when you walked in the door and you stood up and introduced myself, I was like, oops, oops, oops. I don't feel threatened. I hope you don't feel threatened. Once we leave this conversation, I hope, I believe we'll have other conversations with others. Maybe revisit. Maybe your wife and my husband and four of us can get together and continue a conversation. But my point is that, what are we afraid of?

One of the people that we work with closely over the years to develop One Small Step is a guy named Tim Dixon, who founded an organization called More in Common, which is really the leading organization studying the drivers of polarization globally. And he came up with a term called the exhausted majority. So about nine out of 10 Americans are scared of the divisions, sick of it, and scared about where this is going to lead us. And about eight in 10 are willing to actually do something. So one of the things we're going to try to do with One Small Step is lift up the voices of that exhausted majority and hopefully begin to do something other than throw gasoline on the fire that is raging in this country. You have said that this idea is based on something called contact theory. Tell us a little bit about that. Sure. So a psychologist named Gordon Alport came up with contact theory. Tell us a little bit about that.

Sure. So a psychologist named Gordon Alport came up with contact theory in the early 1950s. And basically it says under very specific circumstances, if you bring two people together who are enemies and they have a meaningful conversation with each other, they can come out the other end not hating each other anymore and seeing each other as friends. Very difficult to do. If you do it wrong, you can actually make things worse. But if these conditions are met and it's done right, it can have a really powerful effect. And that's the underpinning of the one small step experience. And I think we've come up with something really special. There's a professor named Jen Richeson, who's a MacArthur fellow at Yale, who's one of the world experts on contact theory, who's been studying the interaction that's happening between

people in one small step. And very often in contact theory, it doesn't generalize to the entire outgroup. They think, okay, I like this person, but everybody else like them is a Nazi or a snowflake or whatever it is. And what we're starting to see with one small step is generalization, that people come out of these interviews, not only liking the person they've talked to, but starting to say, well, maybe the people in the out group as a whole aren't as evil as I thought they were. So that's very encouraging and very exciting and really in the weeds of the science of this thing. Sure, but it feels like it's kind of making a difference, though. It is. And we started thinking about the fact that we have this really powerful intervention that's kind of an antidote to the poison that's being injected into the soul of this country,

telling us that we have to hate each other. And we realized, the CEO at StoryCorps, Sandy Clark, and I realized that we had a moral responsibility to try to get this to some kind of scale leading into the election. And that's what's happening right now. We launched One Small Step America. And anybody in the country who wants to sign up and record a One Small Step interview with someone across the divides now can do that through a special platform that we've set up where you can have and record these conversations. We're also doing a massive public service campaign on billboards and television and radio to socially norm the idea that it's okay for us to talk to people across the divides. Let's hear another excerpt. Alton

Russell is the former chair of the Republican Party in Columbus, Georgia. Wayne Hales was president of the local chapter of the NAACP. They knew of each other, but they had never spoken before this interview. I went to Houston looking for a job, and in this little old bitty office, there was a guy sitting at the desk. He said, what will you do? And I said, anything as long as it's legal. He says, good answer, about $40 a week. And I said, yes, sir. This was legal. He says, good answer, about $40 a week. And I said, yes, sir. This was 1961.

He said, by the way, my name is George Bush. It was George H.W. Bush. Yes, sir. And he was running for Congress. What my job was is I made yard signs with a wooden stake and a piece of poster board and a stencil. But you never run for office? No, never. You've just been the kingmaker. Well, I don't know about that, but no, I never have run. But you've never run for office? No, never have. You've just been the kingmaker.

Well, I don't know about that, but no, I never have run. What do you do for a living? Believe it or not, I'm a toilet paper salesman. Really? Yes, sir. Two-ply? Two-ply, wiping up, yeah. I've been there 40 years.

Is that right? Yeah. But you've done a lot of different things, too. And I just wondered, how in the world did you wind up in Columbus, Georgia? Did you take a wrong turn. I was working for the YMCA and the YMCA here called and said, would I be interested? But as a president of the NAACP, I can tell you how I got into that. When we were growing up, about eight or nine years old, we were traveling to my grandfather's house and we stopped at a laundromat. And when we went in, they said, we don't wash black folks' clothes here.

Of course, they didn't use black folks' word. My father being a preacher, you know, he was cool, but my mother was ready to go off. You know, and we went on to my grandfather's house, and he got on the phone. He called the NAACP. And about 30 minutes later, they said, go on back up to the laundromat. And the right owner stood in the corner while we washed our clothes, red as a beet. So I'm like, oh man, that was a memory that's always been in my mind and how it works. But you know what? I have a good friend of mine. We went to breakfast one morning and when we left, this guy that was in

the restroom came out and followed me to my truck. And he said, are you Alton Russell? And I said, yes, I am. He says, well, I saw you on TV the other day. He said, but I got a question. How can you be a Republican and eat breakfast with that black guy? I said, what did you say? You're way off base. We got things to do. And worrying about whether you're a man, a woman, or white, is not what you need to be focusing on. Yeah. Well, I'll tell you what, I've got a whole different view of you. My perception was, okay, he's always going to be over here.

I'm not going to even talk with him. But this has been eye-opening for me. Well, it has to me, too. And I can go tell some people, Alter's not that bad. He's all right. It's been fun. And I'm really glad to have met you. I sure am.

Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host. As this gets underway nationally, Dave, just looking back on the eight years that you have been doing One Small Step Conversations, I'm curious what about these conversations have really stood out.

Look, I think I shared a lot of the misperceptions about how people get along across the divides before engaging in this work. And I think that the team has as well. I mean, I've been shocked at how well these conversations go. And first of all, this is certainly not an attempt to convince anyone to vote differently. These are Trump voters and Biden voters. And people, they like each other. They really like each other. And almost every conversation ends with the people saying, I want to take you to dinner. We have to do another one of these. I need you to meet my husband.

Let's take a walk together. So it's made me much more hopeful. This country is headed in an extremely dangerous direction. And there's a way out. All we have to do is open our eyes and open our hearts a little bit and take that courageous step of saying, I want to meet you for the good of our democracy, for the good of our children, because none of us wants to leave a country that is irreparably broken for our kids.

And that said, what is your hope for One Small Step going forward? Well, our dream is to convince the country it's our patriotic duty to see the humanity in people with whom we disagree. It's a huge, crazy dream. But I think about a quote from Nelson Mandela at this point every day. He said, it always seems impossible until it's done. So this seems completely impossible, but there's no choice but to try and get this thing done. Dave Isay is the founder and president of StoryCorps. Dave Isay, thank you so much. Elise, great to talk to you. That's it for today. Learn more about StoryCorps' One Small Step program at takeonesmallstep.org and catch stories from the project on the StoryCorps podcast.

TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by our friends at StoryCorps, Carrie Hillman and Michael Garofalo, and mixed by Ben Williams. It was edited by Alejandra Salazar. The TED Talks daily team includes Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson, and Christopher Fazey-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner, Daniela Balarezo, and Will Hennessey. I'm Elise Hu. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening. Looking for a fun challenge to share with your friends and family?

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