The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Bridge Builders: Bringing People Together in a Polarized Age by Nathan Bomey

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Bridge Builders: Bringing People Together in a Polarized Age by Nathan Bomey In these turbulent times, defined by ideological chasms, clashes over social justice, and a pandemic intersecting with misinformation, Americans seem hopelessly divided along fault lines of politics, race, religion, class, and culture. Yet not everyone is accepting the status quo. In Bridge Builders: Bringing People Together in a Polarized Age, journalist Nathan Bomey paints a forensic portrait of Americans who are spanning gaping divides between people of difference. From clergy fighting racism in Charlottesville to a former Republican congressman engaging conservatives on climate change and Appalachian journalists restoring social trust with the public, these countercultural leaders all believe in the power of forging lasting connections to bring about profound change. Though the blueprints for political, social, and cultural bridges vary widely, bridge builders have much in common―and we have much to learn from them. In this book, Bomey dissects the transformational ways in which bridge builders are combatting polarization by pursuing reconciliation, rejecting misinformation, and rethinking the principle of compromise.

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facebook linkedin twitter instagram all those different places go see those as always we have brilliant authors and journalists on the show, I should say. Today we have Nathan Bomey. He is the author of the newest book that he's written, Bridge Builders, Bringing People Together in a Polarized Age. So he certainly has bitten one off here to take and bring to us the news of. And this episode is brought to you by our sponsor, ifi-audio.com, and their Micro-iDSD Signature. It's a top-of-the-range desktop transportable DAC and headphone app that will supercharge your headphones. It has two Brown-Burr DAC chips in it and will decode high-res audio and MQA files. We're using it in the studio right now.

I've loved my experience with it so far. It just makes everything sound so much more richer and better and takes things to the next level. IFI Audio is an award-winning audio tech company with one aim in mind, to improve your music enjoyment of quality sound, eradicate noise, distortion, and hiss from your listening experience. Check out their new incredible lineup of DACs and audio enhancement devices at ifi-audio.com. Nathan is a reporter for the USA Today based in Washington, D.C. area and the author of two previous books, Detroit Resurrected to Bankruptcy and Back After the Fact, The Erosion of Truth and The truth and the inevitable rise of Donald Trump

was another one. He is a regular guest on TV, radio stations, including CNN, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, and NPR. He's also received the National Headliner Award, the Michigan Notable Books Award, and multiple honors from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. And lo and behold, here he is, Nathan. Welcome to the show. So good to be here. So good to have you. Thank you. Very much an honor. We were talking before the show, we had your compatriot, Susan Page, on this show. And that was wonderful to have.

So we're just eventually going to have the whole staff there at USA Today, the way we're trying to go. Susan is a superstar. So if I can do half as good as her, then it's a good day. All right. I think you will. Give us your plugs, Nathan, so people can find you on the interwebs. Well, you can certainly find me on Twitter at Nathan Bomey, N-A-T-H-A-N-B-O-M-E-Y. You can also check out my website, NathanBomey.com. But Twitter is probably the best way to get ahold of me. You can also see how to buy the book there. It's in my bio. It's all pretty easy to find. There you go. So what motivated you to want to write this book? The second book I wrote, like you mentioned, called After the Facts, was about the age of misinformation that was published in 2018. I walked away from that experience just pretty overwhelmed by how incredibly divided we are as

a country over misinformation, but over all sorts of issues. And having done the research, dug into the issues, really understood from a very human perspective how deeply divided we are. You can't walk away from that experience without thinking that I'm not sure that we can do anything about this. You couple that with the fact that as a national journalist, I experience every day the division and the hate that you see, often directed at journalists, but often just seeing people lobby it at each other, and you're immersed in it. And so in view of those things, I said, I got to go out and meet people who aren't accepting the status quo, I've got to go out and talk to people who are trying to bridge differences, whether it's politics, religion, class, or culture. I just

had to go out and meet people who were not accepting that status quo. And so that's what I did starting in late 2018, started going out, meeting people across the country, just trying to understand how are you doing this? Because so many of us don't seem to be capable of it. So are there specific people that are trying to build bridges? Because I gave up on my bridges. I just brought them all and said, if you're, if racism is like, to me, racism is in politics. That's just racism. And that's just a horrible thing to be doing. And when people are like, well, is this politics? No, it's not. It's just, it's just, it's like murder isn't politics either. If you murder somebody, that's murder. That's a heinous crime. So how did you find these people that were building bridges and where are they?

Yeah, no, good question. Yeah, I do think that they're a rare species. To be a bridge builder is to be someone who's really living counter-culturally. And it's not a normal thing to try to meet people and to try to gain respect and understanding for people who look differently, pray differently, think differently. That is going against the grain. And so it wasn't in some areas, it was easy to find the right people. In other areas, it was not. I tried to make this somewhat organic where I didn't want to force it. I don't want to just Google something and say, introduce me to some bridge builders. That doesn't really work. And so I had a couple

people in mind in advance who I thought would be good. And then I built out from there. But for example, it was not that difficult to find people who are trying to bridge gaps on race and ethnicity issues. Went to Charlottesville, talked to people in Charlottesville who were dealing with the aftermath. But then it was extremely difficult to find people who are using social media to try to bring people together. Talk about an area where it was just like, I can't find anybody. So that one took a long time. Eventually found in this amazing group that is actually trying to do that. It was an organic process, but a really rewarding one. You're right about how building bridges is the best way to begin addressing America's crisis of polarization, but it doesn't require unity.

Can you explain what that means? Yeah, I think it's really important because the concept of unity or the goal is idealistic. And I understand why you might want that. And maybe in an ideal society, we would have unity, but it's not necessarily the goal of people I interviewed for this book. Their goal is more to achieve some sort of respect or understanding and appreciation for our shared humanity in the sense that I no longer demonize or dehumanize you as a person. I understand that you're a human and you have perspectives on the world that oftentimes are legitimate. And we're not saying there's no excuse for hate and intolerance and things like that. We're not talking about that. We're talking about issues where there is plenty of room for perspective and we can actually find some

respect for each other's humanity. So it's not that we have to agree. In fact, conflict is completely okay. Bridge builders embrace conflict because they understand that is actually key to a free society, a free democracy. It's not a democracy without conflict. That's an authoritarian government. So we're going to have a conflict. Question is, how do we deal with it? And it can be a conflict that, you know, friction that generates fire, of course. But the question is, does it burn the building down or do we use it as a refiner's fire of sorts? And you talk about much like real world bridge building, the metaphorical type does not necessarily require people to meet in the middle. So how does that work? How do we meet? So I was called to mind the song by

Maren Morris and Zed and Gray, I think it is where it says, baby, why don't you just meet me in the middle? And I understand that's oftentimes like how we view this sort of thing. But the reality is that actually, oftentimes, we don't necessarily have to meet in the middle to build bridges. And I actually took the opportunity for this book to go out and meet real life bridge builders, people who are actually doing the architecture and contracting and engineering of real life bridges. And I said, give me an understanding of how you do your work. And they point out, they said, we actually don't always meet, build the bridge to meet directly in the middle. Sometimes you actually build the bridge from one side of the ravine to the other side, which I found to be very fascinating. And from a metaphorical perspective,

same thing where, you know, sometimes, yeah, the other side is completely wrong and you're completely right. Now, I don't think that's usually the case, but it's like, except for if I'm arguing with my wife, then I'm completely right. But exactly not the case. But usually there's going to be some degree of right and wrong. And so the question is, how do we try to reach the other side? And even if you do genuinely feel like, and maybe you have completely correct reasons to feel like you're in the right, the reality is, unless you build that bridge to the other side, in a lot of cases, you're not going to achieve progress for yourself. This isn't just about them.

It's about you, too. Somehow we need to build better bridges to each other. So how do you know that you should be building a bridge to the other side, that it's worth taking the time to build to the side? Yeah, it's tough. I think that we can all agree that we're immersed in vitriol, immersed in divisiveness and polarization. And I think most of us have a pretty good idea when we are ensconced in some sort of political brokenness in some way, or whether it's maybe not politics, maybe it's race, or maybe it's religious, or maybe it's something, some sort of cultural issue where we're divided. And the question is, are you, do you believe that things will get better if you just stay in your camp? Or do you believe that things will, could potentially get better if you step out of your camp or if the two camps have a meeting of some sort? Because we use the word tribalism a lot to describe how we are in America now. And I think it's pretty accurate because you know what, we're still pretty segregated in this country. Segregated by race, yes, but also segregated by politics, by certainly, of course, geography, that being the sense of the term, but urban versus rural, for example, by religion. Dr. Martin Luther King said that Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in America. We don't tend to know people who think differently, look differently, pray differently than we are. And I believe in the fundamental

thread of this book is that if you don't form relationships between people who aren't like you, then you won't be able to understand people who aren't like you. That's true. Understanding who people are. I've had, I had a few friends that they're very anti-gay and anti-gay marriage and they're religious. And so I talked to them and I told them about some of the struggles of what gay people go through and why this is important. They can't hold the hand of a loved one as they're dying in a hospital bed unless they're afforded these certain rights. And the more I told them about the different experiences of that and how really what goes on between two people is a thing of love usually. Unless you're married, then, you know, who knows what's going on there.

I'm just kidding. I'm doing marriage jokes. I'm just kidding people. But, and so the more I espouse that sort of experience to them, the more their minds started to change where they realized that these are human beings too. And so I think there's pertinence in what you talk about, how we need to identify that people are human beings. And do we need to sit down and say, look, it's not about trying to be right or wrong. It's about how do we figure out what's best for everyone, including ourselves? Maybe, for example, you being 100% for me, trying to fight to be 100%. We figure out how there's got to be a balance that we can achieve where I can maintain some semblance of I think we're heading in the right direction.

We recognize there are certain things that need to move forward for our country or for our people or for humanity in and of itself. Yeah, I would say I think we need to agree to we need to be able to agree to disagree. And yet that is become an anachronism where the idea that we can agree to disagree is actually like something we can't even agree on itself. That it's just certainly like, we live in this hot take culture where I am going to spew my takes and I'm going to embarrass because it makes me feel good. And that ultimately just leads to the completely counterproductive spiral into further and further divisiveness. And what I find is that bridge builders choose inclusion over exclusion, of course, but they also choose nuance over caricature in the sense that they're not going

to label people. They're not going to try to put people in a box because they understand that people are complex, that you can't just put a two word phrase on someone and say, this encompasses all of who they are. And I think oftentimes we fall into that trap. It's easy to see the world through a binary lens, but really you need to see it through this prism. And I think that bridge builders are pretty intentional about understanding that if I am not curious about the world, then I am actually doing a disservice to myself. But to your point, in terms of how do we understand that we need to be on, we need to somehow come to this understanding that, okay, it's okay if we disagree, but we have to work on this. I think it comes down to the recognition that our destinies are interwoven with each other because we live in this two-party democracy. We live in a system

where we're not going to progress. Literally the system is built up to prevent us from progressing unless we work together. Like this is the system we're stuck in. It's the family we're born into. And unless this dysfunctional family starts working again, we're not going to be able to progress together. Martin Luther King said we're caught together in this inescapable web of mutuality. Valerie Cowher, a Sikh civil rights activist, just came out with this amazing book last year called See No Stranger, where she says, you are a part of me. I do not yet know. And the point being that even if we disagree, even if I don't understand how your destiny could be interwoven with mine, then if I understand at least, then I can start to pursue that and say, okay, let me learn more about you and understand why we are caught together in this

way. There you go. That's really what we need to do. How do we get people disengaged though? Because some of these people get caught in the message machines, especially on the right side, the Betsy DeVos billion dollar machines that run radio. And you've got this flood of memes that are had different racist tropes or political tropes of stuff and people just people aren't thinking politically anymore they're just sharing little jabs back and forth like this person isn't that this person isn't that how do we take that to a discussion as opposed to just throwing up lazy memes i do think it's a incredibly difficult vortex that so many people are stuck in like you said and i do think it's important to acknowledge up front that a lot of people are not going to get out of that vortex.

It's just, it is what it is. And in some ways, we have to understand that. I actually, in this book, don't necessarily cast an optimistic outlook. And I try to say, here's the path toward progress, not necessarily that we will make progress, because I can't necessarily say that. But I would say that if we to try to get people out of that, I think that it starts again, goes back to this understanding that we need to build relationships between people who aren't like each other, but doesn't necessarily need to be all organic. I actually think that there are some ways we can start to do this on a national scale or into in our institutions and i think about schools for example if adults like you and me are a lost cause chris maybe the kids aren't like we can maybe agree that the kids maybe still have some room to no that's true that's true

but they're the future and so if they're going to drive the discourse in this country going forward then maybe we start in schools and we say say, hey, listen, we live in this remote Zoom-oriented educational world now. Why can't this district say to this other district, let's put our kids together and have class projects. Let's actually have them work together. Why do we have to let the classroom boundaries restrict how kids get to know each other now? Kids are virtual, they're digital, they'll embrace this. And so I think that's a small way, those sorts of things, we can start to do some small things. And so I think that's a small way of those sorts of things, we can start to do some small things. And the other idea is public American public service campaign, a national public service campaign, that actually has been embraced on a bipartisan

perspective from Republicans and Democrats approved under President Obama to triple the number of national public service positions talking about AmeriCorps, for example. And the idea is, it's all there, just got to get the funding to do it now that Congress needs to give the money to get up to a million positions. Because you know what? When you're serving someone shoulder to shoulder, you often tend to learn from them. You understand their perspectives and you learn from the people you're serving. And I think that's a proven way to bridge divides. There you go. Were there any stories of bridge builders that stuck out in your book that you told oh there's so many you know it's it's just

that i would point you to one for example that i think is on a topic that maybe some of your listeners will be passionate about climate change is obviously something i think we can agree is so we have something we have to do about something dramatic about and yet it seems like we're just stuck on this issue how do we build bridges on an issue that actually defines our future as a planet, as a people? And I met this, who is a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, still a Republican, still a conservative, still active Christian, but he's become an avid believer for the need to do something dramatic about climate change. And he says, I know how to reach my fellow conservatives. He's actually trying to build bridges

on his own camp, which I find to be so interesting. He's trying to help conservatives build the bridge to show, hey, listen, you can walk across to the other side. Now, the difference between the approach he takes and the approach that's often taken on the left is he says, he's trying not to say to conservatives change your values he's trying to say here's how action on climate change fits within your values because if we if we try to get people to change who they are no matter what it is like chances are pretty low that people are going to change their identity because the science is so they're not going to do that that's who they they are. But if you can say, no, listen, this actually aligns with who you are, then they're much more likely to say, OK, I can do this.

So I think that's a really interesting perspective. And it comes down to really simple things. Like he says, let's not talking about believing in climate change, because that's a word that Christians often associate with religion. They don't want to believe in climate change as a value system. But let's say, no, we understand that the science is accurate or something more like less religious, basic language decisions. Sometimes it comes down to some simple things that we can do to start to reach the other side. That's pretty interesting. Now you talk about how journalists can be bridge builders as well. How does that work? This is really important to me because as a journalist, I've been in local journalism

for many years, now I've been in national journalism for six years. And to me, I didn't want to write a book like this on myself and my own industry and saying, what can we do to actually contribute to this? But also, what have we done to make things worse? Because I will defend all day long journalists from these false accusations of fake news like that has harmed us as industry as individuals, it's harmed our democracy. But so I reject those. But at the same time, I also have to say, I do think there are some things that we have mistakes we've made. And maybe we've sensationalized a little too much

chase the clicks, chase the ratings, stretch things just a little bit. Every little stretch ends up leading to a break. And so I feel like we can't talk about this without at least saying, okay, let's look inward and say, what can we do? And I think, and I met this amazing group called 100 Days in Appalachia, which is doing nonprofit grassroots journalism throughout Appalachia, actually based in Morgantown, West Virginia, and went there and I'm talking to them and they're saying, listen, we're doing great journalism, just like they are at the Times or the Post, or we're just doing on a local level. We're trying to tell authentic stories about the people of Appalachia, who in a lot of ways have been caricatured over the last four to five years by the national media. Folks like me, unfortunately, who've painted these very unfair and oftentimes sensational portraits of these people,

the toothless coal miner and that sort of thing. And it just ends up creating more distance between the media and the public. So they're trying to restore trust between the media and the public. And that sort of bridge building is one of the most difficult, I think, that we have. But it's still crucial to our democracy. I think we had some journalists on who wrote some books. I think it was called Censored, and it was from the New York Times. And he wrote about how, I guess, looking at the Reuters, he basically looked at the Reuters feed, not the Reuters feed. What's the other feed? The AP feed. I think it was the AP feed. And he compared the titles of the stories that were being fed through the Associated Press to the stories that were in the New York Times during Trump's

administration. And he pointed to a salaciousness of how they were jacked up, as he claims by the New York Times to be more salacious. Maybe that's an example of where there needs to be better bridges for building maybe better language in our, in the wordings of our press or something. And it's our own fault. Like I have people that say, Oh, the press, they put everything's on fire and whatever. And if it bleeds, it leads. And, but then I'm like, they do that because that's what you respond to. If you wouldn't respond to it, it bleeds, it leads. And you're like, hey, we want to see more stories of what isn't going to kill us tonight. You know how local news always does that thing.

Tonight at 11, how a teddy bear will kill you in your sleep. It's just waiting. It's been waiting this whole time. Don't let it near the knives. And you're just like, what? The teddy bear? Yeah, gummy bears anyway well i say that journalists don't have we don't really have obviously there's some biased

people out there but we in general we don't have a bias toward one side or the other the bias is toward conflict like you said the bias is toward some sort of intense conflict that will ultimately draw in eyes and so we're not going to stop covering conflict. Of course, that's not going to be the case if we stop doing. But I think the question is, how do we frame those stories? And like you said, how do we write those headlines? And what angles are we pursuing there? Because and again, what 100 Days in Appalachia is doing is trying to pursue more solutions oriented journalism, where they say, here's the conflict, but let's talk about how do we solve this? We're not going to necessarily dwell on the conflict as much as we are going to say, but how do we move us forward? And I think oftentimes we as journalists commit the sin

of ignoring the solution. And a lot of times we just don't get to that part of it, or it's like a throw in at the end of the story or the news report. And I think that actually there's, it's pretty proven people actually do want to see that because the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel a couple years ago eliminated most of their op-ed content. Now, they're actually owned by my company, so just full disclosure. But they found they were going to invest in solutions-oriented journalism. And they found readership actually went way up because people were like, I'm sick of all the hot takes. And I can get that anywhere. In fact, that's everywhere. You can find plenty of opinions not many solutions and i think people are pretty

hungry for that i think they are especially after trump i had a lot of people say to me the news media is really biased i'm like why because they're always writing bad things about trump and i'm like do you ever consider that maybe he's doing a lot of bad things and like he's doing stuff that like no president has ever done ever like on a daily fucking basis i watch rachel maddow and you'd see her throw away a whole show every night she's like we wrote a show but this is just off the news so we got to throw that show away and here's the new burning building and so i like this i think it's interesting to focus on more results orientedoriented news.

Maybe tonight at 11, that teddy bear will kill you, but we'll show you how not to. Here's the thing. I think people, readers, viewers, listeners in your case, understand that we are going to write and talk about tough issues. They get that. They're not going to shy away from that, but they want you to do it in a way that's responsible and authentic to who the people are. And I think when it comes to journalism, a lot of times it needs to be local

journalists who tell these stories, not national journalists like myself, because if you're a local journalist, you're on the ground, you understand the community. Again, you have the relationships, which I think in a lot of cases is what's key to restoring the trust. The national journalists pray that we, you know, parachute in, we don't really know the story. A lot of times we get it wrong. Sometimes we get it right, but it can be a crapshoot. And I think we can't discount the role that the destruction of journalism as economically over the last 20 years has played in diminishing the trust between people and the media. There just simply aren't many journalists left in a lot of these communities. Sometimes there's none. How can we

expect people to trust a journalist if they don't know one? It's like they don't even know these people. How can they trust them? And so I think we need to see more investment in especially nonprofit journalism, which we are starting to see a lot more of now, where foundations are putting money into journalism saying, this is part of our democracy. We have to have this if we're going to achieve any sort of progress together. You bring up a good point that made me realize something. When I grew up, there was three channels. There was ABC, NBC, and CBS. And then you had a couple of black and white channels, if you lived in California, that would play like Godzilla. And you knew your journalists. You knew who the people were. You knew who Bob Woodward was. And you knew your journalists. You knew who the people were. You knew who Bob

Woodward was. And you knew the top journalists. And you'd watch 60 Minutes and you'd see Mike Wallace. And you knew your journalists. But now everything's so disconnected and broken. Of course, everybody and their idiot dog with a YouTube channel and a video camera is a podcaster. Wait, what? Or a journalist these days. Everyone's a journalist. There you go. You don't know. And there's a level of trust that's not there. There's so many people that will cover different things now. I imagine big organizations like yours, they have hundreds of different people that work for them and just trying to figure out, who is this again? And maybe that's where the level of trust got lost over the years with

journalism. I don't know. Yeah, I think it is. I'm 37, but I started my career when I was 17 as a journalist in high school and I go to college. So for the four years I'm in college and the last year in high school, I worked at the community newspaper in my hometown, just a little weekly paper. And I don't know why the editor trusted me to do this job, but he sent me out to cover sports and features. And then also the township board of trustees meeting. So I'm sitting there, the Lodi township board meetings, trying to figure out like, why are they debating septic system zoning requirements and all this bizarre stuff about gravel quarry regulations and things.

And I didn't really understand it right away, but eventually I figured it out. And the point is that I was there. At least I was someone who was what was happening in this community. And I had the relationships with people there who understood who I was. They understood my byline. And like you said, they had the trust in me. Maybe they don't always agree with what I wrote, but they understood who I was as a person. And I think that on the ground kind of journalism is so much more effective in establishing trust with the public than the talking heads on cable news who oftentimes are going to just

generate more and more outrage. And I understand that outrage generates revenue, but it's not good for our democracy. Yeah, not good for our democracy at all. You talk about how bridge builders still stand up for truth, but they also recognize there's room for perspective. Give us a little bit better definition. What's the difference between perspective and truth? I do think it's always important to say upfront that you can't build a bridge across an ocean. It just can't be done. But not every divide is an ocean. Oftentimes the divides that we think are oceans are more like rivers, that you can actually bridge it. You're just not really unsure why, or maybe the divide looks bigger than it is in real life. And so that I like to look at is this idea of a stadium where you're watching a game.

Let's say you and I go to a football game or a basketball game. And let's say, let's go to the big house in Ann Arbor, the area I grew up in, in Michigan, where Michigan Wolverines play 110,000 people. And I'm sitting on one side and I see Charles Woodson make a play in the field. And this would have been like the late nineties. You see it in one, get in one way. To me, the plan folded in a way that's just really irrefutable. I saw it my way, but you know what? It's 109,999 other slightly different and sometimes much different perspectives on how the play, the same play unfolded on the field, same play, you know, same facts. Now the person next to me probably saw it pretty much the same as me, but people on the other side of the stadium

saw it a much different way. Now we may have still seen this. We may still agree. Yeah. He stepped out of bounds or he, he scored the touchdown, but unless I go to the other side of the stadium and see things from that person's perspective and say, okay, you show me what you saw, then I won't be able to understand them. And I also may not figure out that I was wrong. It's possible you go to the other side and you're like, actually, I see things differently now. Or maybe you get to the other side and you show them, now it looks like you're missing this. But no, the point is that there is room for perspective. There's not room for perspective on issues like the results of the election. Listen, Trump lost the election.

That's a fact. There's not room for perspective on that kind of thing. But there are plenty of issues where there is room for perspective, and we have to accept that. We've got to get the other person to accept that to a certain degree, don't we? Yeah. Before you can really talk about it. And so I think that's the hard part where you sit down with them you go look we agree that this whatever but they get caught in the minutiae and i think part of the problem is these talking points

for these politicians like mitch mcconnell and stuff that run everyone around by the nose they just pick up these talking points christian radio and right wing radio and they just run with it and so that feeds in their narrative and everyone just runs around parroting that bullshit and so hopefully there's a way to do this you write that bridge builders embrace conflict And so that feeds in their narrative and everyone just runs around parroting that bullshit. And so hopefully there's a way to do this. You write that bridge builders embrace conflict. So does that mean I need to go fist to cuffs? It means that we don't have to build bridges with each other.

We don't have to just eliminate all our disagreements. That's actually not the point because that's often the critique of this perspective is this weak or milquetoast way of doing things that you have to, I'll just get along. Why can't we all just get along? That's actually not it at all. The point of building bridges is not to iron out all these conflicts. The point is so that we can address the conflicts together, or we can at least have an understanding of each other as a person, even though we might still disagree. Again, it comes back to our democracy. It doesn't work without conflict. The system was built so that we would work together in some way. The problem is that compromise has become a dirty word. It's become this idea that if you compromise, then you are going against your principles. But the truth is that compromise actually is a principle. And it's a principle that's really

interwoven in our national politics, which again, is not to say that you have to give up everything you believe in as a person to know you can pursue it all, try to get the other person on your side by building a bridge toward them. I think people can change, Chris. I think we've seen this country change over time. You mentioned gay marriage earlier. I think that's a really interesting example where America has changed. In 2004, 31% of Americans were pro-gay marriage. I just saw the Gallup data the other day. Now, it's up to more than 70%. So in basically a decade and a half, it's gone from 30 to 70. I thought that was a contentious social issue we would never agree on. It turns out, actually, people are changing their minds. So people can change. It just sometimes takes time.

I wonder if, too, that decade and a half, it's more changing of the generations than anything. I remember somebody said to me once about closet racism and a lot of the older generation that was supporting Trump. I have one of my friends say, you're probably not going to change those people. We just have to wait for that generation to die off that grew up in the 50s and grew up with some of those hardcore biases. This is a way for them to die off. And this younger generation, of course, seems to be the one that's more inclusive and more open-minded about things. Do you think that's maybe true with seeing that 10 and a half year span that maybe a different set of voters have come into play? I imagine that's got to be part of it. Although I think if you look at the data, you can see even the views among older people changing as well, maybe not to the same extent to your point, but, but you can't move 40 points of the American public without having at least a few older people

who changed their minds as well. Yeah. I definitely think there's no doubt that the older you get in general, the more entrenched you are. But again, that's why I think maybe education is a good way, good place to start. But I don't think we can stop there. Because of course, not everyone, we can't send everyone back to school. I think that it does have to be more organic than that. And there are cool groups that are trying to reach older people, for example, a group called media wise and the news literacy project, they're actually teaching senior citizens how to try to sort fact from fiction. And they're working with the AARP to do that, which is really cool. And the point is that on a lot of cases, seniors actually really do want to figure out the truth, but they really struggle with understanding what's true and what's not

online. And we have to give them some grace and understanding. They did not grow up in this digital era, and they have to sort through this crazy collision of opinions and facts. And maybe we need to equip them with a few skills on how to sort through it. And just real quick, how they start that, they don't start by saying, so let's talk about how you all incorrectly believe. They don't start there. They start with, let's talk about, has anyone gotten an online health scam? Everyone got that in their email. Oh, everyone raises their

hand. That's a nonpartisan thing. We can all agree. Okay. Misinformation is a problem. So now let's talk about how do we deal with it? And you start from a nonpolitical place like that, and then you go from there. I like that. That's pretty good. You're talking about how active listening is important to resolving stuff. How do I deal with if the other person is a moron? There's an old line from, I believe it's from Ron Brown, Ron White. You can't fix stupid. Stupid is forever. There are some people, I don't know, I'm just doing a joke here, but talk to us about active listening and why that's important. Yeah. You're not going to reach everyone. I think that's just a fact. And it's listening. You look at the percentage of people in this country who believe in crazy

things. I was going to say like the fact that aliens live here or something, except for that we now have a government agency saying that maybe they do. But no, the point is that, yeah, you're always going to get a percentage of people who are going to believe something crazy. That's just going to be the case. But I do think that when you listen to someone who's not like you, then that actually is the way to start. And it doesn't mean that you're validating what they believe. It's that

you're validating who they are as a person and that they have a right to have beliefs. And here's one of the interesting parts though about this. One of the goals of listening is actually to be heard. Like that you want that person to listen to you. But if you don't listen to them first, a lot of times they're not going to engage with you. You have to invest in their story. And a lot of people, and this is like pretty well backed up and by data, they just want to be heard that you see them, that you understand them, you see who they are, you validate their human humanity. And then all of a sudden they start to listen to you too. And I find that to be such an interesting dichotomy because we often think, no, I got to tell them how it is.

But actually, maybe if I listen first, then I can start to understand them. And then I'll be a little more likely to be able to explain and do that show, not tell. It's like your English teacher always tells you, show, not tell. We need to start showing people shoulder to shoulder in these conversations with each other, how we see the world instead of telling them how we see the world face to face, which I think just doesn't work. There you go. We have to work together somehow. So what do you hope the book achieves? Do you hope that more people will focus on trying to be bridge builders as opposed to just attacking on talking points or something? Two things. I want to start a conversation because I do believe that conversations between people who aren't like each other are crucial to our democracy, that we can't do this

without it. It just doesn't work if we all stay in our silos. You can't change the world from an island. You got to build a bridge to be able to start to change the world. So I think it starts there. But yeah, and then I think the other thing is I want people to see that, listen, something really small, like just getting to know someone who's not like you can actually really start to change things. It might change you. It might change them. It might do both. And I think we can all agree that we can't stay where we are. I think we can all agree that that's the good news. There is actually a study out there that shows something like 67% of Americans are what we call an exhausted majority, which is basically, they're just fed up with everybody.

They're just, I can't deal with this noise anymore. So I think that's in a bizarre way, people like they just want us to be able to start to communicate effectively, even if we continue to disagree. There you go. There you go. It's been wonderful to have you on, Nathan. Anything more you want to plug on the book before we go? It's just an honor to be on your show. Bridge Builders is on Amazon, Barnes & Noble. It's in bookstores and things, but just appreciate the support. What I'd say is to listeners, show that you support a book like this because the publishing world needs to see it. I understand they publish a lot of books that may tear people apart. Let's support a book that tries to do the opposite.

There you go. And that's, it's important because if you don't support it, then you're going to have more. If it bleeds, it leads on the news. You've got to, they give you what you want as an audience to tune in for the good stuff and you'll get more good stuff. It's kind of like Walmart said one time they go, if more people people buy organic, we'll fill the shelves with organic food. That's right. It's marketing and marketing products. So demand better and you'll get better and support books like yours. Nathan, give us your plug so people can find you on the interwebs.

Certainly. You can follow me on Twitter at Nathan Bomey, B-O-M-E-Y. You can also go to my website, NathanBomey.com. But Twitter, just Google me and find me there. That's where you'll see it all right there. There you go. And Nathan, wonderful to have you on. Very honored.

Thank you very much for spending time with us today. Excellent. Thanks so much for having me, Chris. Thank you. And thanks to my audience for tuning in. Be sure to pick up the book, Bridge Builders, Bringing People Together in a Polarized Age. I think this is real important we need to all be better bridge builders and why can't we all just get along famous saying to my audience

go see us on youtube.com for just chris voss tell your friends names relatives subscribe to the podcast go to uh goodreads.com for just chris voss and see all of our groups on facebook linkedin twitter and all those different places be good to each other be nice and we'll see you guys next