The Origins Podcast with Lawrence Krauss - Polarization, Powerlessness, and what We can Actually Do

Episode Date: November 29, 2025

On this week’s episode of The Origins Podcast, I am excited to release a conversation that has been sitting in our archives for more than a year. When we first recorded this discussion with conflict mediator and systems thinker Diana McLain Smith, political polarization was already a significant national and international problem. It has only gotten worse.The world seems more tribal than ever, and there is constant pressure to have to pick a side in every argument and not listen to any different opinions, or even divergent facts. In this episode, we step back from that noise and ask what our deep evolutionary wiring for in group loyalty means in a complex modern democracy, how history and culture can turn ordinary differences into hardened divides, and what it might take to reduce the space between “us” and “them” rather than accept permanent hostility as normal.Through stories that range from local communities like Billings, Montana and Lewiston, Maine to the quiet work of reform in the United States Congress, Diana draws on decades of experience with families, organizations, and civic coalitions to show that citizens are not as powerless as we often feel, especially when we resist the demand for instant certainty and allow ourselves to say, “I do not know, I have not really thought about that before. I’m not on any one side. Let me look at the evidence before I form an opinion.”This is the basis of much of the scientific method, and it is something that we can all learn to do too. The benefits are immediate. You approach life with more curiosity, and you are freer from assumptions and biases.Conversations like this go to the heart of the Origins Project Foundation mission, which is to bring the habits of mind that underlie science into our shared public life. My conversations on the podcast blend serious works in physics, psychology, and history with urgent questions about how we live together, and to model what it looks like to treat ideas as hypotheses to be tested rather than badges of tribal identity.In an environment that rewards outrage more than understanding, a commitment to evidence, curiosity, and a willingness to change one’s mind is not just an intellectual posture, it is a civic act.This episode with Diana is offered in that spirit.As always, an ad-free video version of this podcast is also available to paid Critical Mass subscribers. Your subscriptions support the non-profit Origins Project Foundation, which produces the podcast. The audio version is available free on the Critical Mass site and on all podcast sites, and the video version will also be available on the Origins Project YouTube. Get full access to Critical Mass at lawrencekrauss.substack.com/subscribe

Hi, and welcome to The Origins Podcast. I'm your host, Lawrence Krause. In this episode, I got to have a discussion with Diana McLean Smith, someone who I admit I had never heard of until I saw her book that was pointed out to me, and her book is called Remaking the Space Between Us, how citizens can work together to build a better future for all. Now, Diana has been a consultant and basically a thought leader who's led change in many industries. Her work has been basically to help organizations evolve and change.

And she's tried to, you know, apply those ideas to looking at our society. I admit I was skeptical when I first looked at it. However, I really enjoyed reading the book because there's a great discussion here of literally the techniques of what we need to do to literally remake the space between us. We live in such polarized times that anything might help. And a discussion of the historical and evolutionary context of that. And then some examples of how groups have really done change, not just within organizations, but within communities. and tools that may help us address the issues we have as a nation, and also to realize that some of the bad news we get

is sometimes artificially bad. There's a great discussion of some amazing efforts within Congress itself to remove its polarization that you never hear about. And so I found it an uplifting conversation, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did. And you can watch it ad-free on our critical mass substack site, or you can watch it after that on our use.

YouTube channel or Origins Project YouTube channel or listen to it or on any podcast listening site. It was a fascinating and I think uplifting conversation. And I hope you'll, whether you, whether you watch it or listen to it, I hope you'll consider supporting the Origins Project Foundation, which runs the podcast, the nonprofit foundation. And your support helps us make this possible. So whether you watch it or listen to it, I hope you enjoy this discussion with Diana McLean Smith. With no further ado. Well, Diana, nice to meet you and thank you very much for being on the podcast. Lawrence, it is an honor. I saw your last podcast was done with a No-M-M-L prize winner.

So I've got some pretty hefty shoes to fill here. Oh, I'm sure he would say the same thing after this one. But anyway, it is great to have you here and it's a it's a it's kind of a a different take i i found your book in an unusual way and it and it intrigued me so we'll talk about it but first as you know if you saw the last podcast or any the others this is an origins podcast and i um i try and find out how people got to where they are before we start talking about where they are and you were a challenge for me because i could i found some information about you, but you're amazingly mysterious, which I thought was great, at least your early life. I know about the later parts of it. Basically, what I know about is from your

graduate school onwards at Harvard, your graduate schooling. And I know you were a family therapist before that, but I want to come way back. Where did you grow up? Well, going way back, which is truly the origin story. Yes. I grew up in, Maryland first for six years, then Connecticut, with a seasoning of Vermont, because we would go to Vermont a lot, and came from a family of six, including my parents. I was the youngest of four. I was the only girl. It was, I was, I grew up in the 50s and 60s. And my mother was a very rebellious woman. Was she a 60? So was she like in the, it's a 60s? A 60s? kind of, no, she was more of a, she was just, she was rebellious. She was born in 1917. She was

rebellious from the moment she came out of the world. Oh, interesting. I mean, that was her personality. And she married American. Was she born in the States? She was born in the States. And she came from, her father was a physician and a very well-known and well-respected physician in New York City. Her mom was a social climber, which she wanted nothing to do with. Her mom wanted her to be a great lady, and she ended up being an extraordinary athlete. She never competed on the big stage, but there wasn't a sport that she took up that she wasn't extraordinary at, and she was asked to live a constrained life, and she just didn't want to do it.

She fell in love with my dad, who at the time had nothing. his dad died during the flu epidemic in 1918 so he was three years old when he lost his father his father was also a physician but he was one of the first psychiatrists in the united states and he was treating people in a sane asylum when the flu epidemic hit and as a physician he was treating them he caught the flu and he died and my dad ended up moving with his younger brother and mother to France and he went to a Jesuit boarding school started at age six. Wow, that's intense. And he was, he had all the markings of someone who, intellectually as someone who was raised by Jesuits. He's never seen a more rigorous thinker. And he would put us all through

the paces at the dining room table. And politics was what got served up every night. Politics. Okay. So what now, okay, you, two interesting. parents that clearly impact on you in different ways. What was, what, what did your father do? Did he have a career? He did. He had a career. He started, he had no money. He had to drop out a Fordham during the Depression. He went to end up going to work for this really small business machine company in upstate New York. And he met a fellow there who became kind of a father figure to him because he had lost his own father. And so that guy really liked my dad and invested in him.

And that guy happened to have been Tom Watson, Sr. at IBM. Okay. And so my dad worked his, you have to say, my dad was politically, my dad was to the left of liberal. Okay. And he climbed the ladder at IBM. Wow, yeah. When you said a small business machine in Upstate New York, I was getting ready.

Yeah, right, right, exactly. And so he climbed up the ladder, and by the time he retired in 1968, he was on the management committee with Tom Watson Jr., with whom he did not get along, Vince Learson, who was a dear friend, and Al Williams, I believe his name was, who was also a good friend. And when Tom Watson Jr. retired, he gave the CEO ship to Vince and my dad retired at 55 years old. Oh, so he he would hope would admit perhaps to be the CEO maybe? Absolutely. And, you know, and as no big surprise, as he would tell it, you know, it was, he never was bitter about it. So I don't want to portray it as, you know, he worked at IBM, but he didn't have a technical training or anything. No, he didn't have no computer.

But he did. When he left, he left because he got to a level of management, which I'm very sympathetic with, where all you're doing is reviewing other people's work. And it's just not intellectually interesting. So he left. But his background was definitely in the humanities. And what his gift was, was thinking across different disciplines, which is something everybody in my family has done. And that's relevant.

Yeah. And so he went through every single function in IBM by the time he got to the top. And he was instrumental in selling the IBM equipment to NASA. He met with Kennedy and Johnson during the, you know, the push to get to the moon, you know, and there was this big investment. So I have these, you know, wonderful pictures of him meeting Kennedy. Who was his idol? Oh, well, perfect.

I mean, in 19, yeah, in 1962, I was getting on the bus in New Canaan, Connecticut, which is wealthy, white, and conservative. Yes, I know from my time teaching at Yale, yes. Okay, yep, yep. And so, you know, we'd get on the bus, my brothers and I, we'd say Kennedy's going to win. And of course, there wasn't a person on the bus whose family was for Kennedy, right? And so everybody was like, nah, Nixon's got it. And anyway, by the time we got to school, we were very, very discouraged, but then Kennedy won, and it was quite a victory.

Yeah, okay. So he was, so, and he was, so as he, he was political, obviously to the left. Humanity's background, self-educated then. He didn't go to, didn't go to college, but he was self-educated. He, but he had such an education. This guy knew, all the classics. I do not. And obviously fluent in French. I remember when I became a feminist, he started asking me about all the female authors. So tell me about Willa Caffa. I go, Willa Caffa, who's she? Or when I got radical at the end of the 60s, which never totally left my soul, he said, well, what about Mao Cet Tongue's Red Book? What can you tell me about Mao State Tongues read book and I went, I don't know.

And then when he was almost 90 and he was, you know, very ill, and 9-11 happened, this is, I guess it was a few years before, you know, he was probably 85 at the time, but he was still ill. And 9-11 hit, he called me up to make sure I was okay. And after he found out I was okay, he said, can you get me a copy of the Koran and a really good history of Islam? So that was my dad. Okay.

Perfect. Okay. Perfect. Okay, yeah. Well, actually, that's relevant. I was going to ask influence. Before I ask about him particularly, did your mom go to, she also had no higher education? No, so my mom didn't. I was the first woman to ever get a college education in my family. Or first woman. Your brothers did, but your parents went to college. Your father was clearly a voracious reader. Did that impact on you? Did your mother read much, or was it your father's influence? No, my mom read a lot. She was very, very smart. Again, she was self-educated, but she was more social, more athletic. She lived in the physical social world more than he did. But she was very up to date on politics. She was a member of political organizations. I remember she went to a march in New York City, a civil rights march, and Harry Belafonte was there.

and she said something, you know, thanking him, and he said, well, what have you done lately, you know, and she went, oops, you know, and she took that to heart. So, you know, she was also very, very liberal and, you know, they raised us to feel a sense of responsibility for our country and for the world and for the problems that we face and to do it with a sense of fairness and a sense of compassion and kindness and a deep humanity. And they were not great parents, but they inculcated us with great values. Well, then they were, then they did something right. They did a lot right. But, you know, a lot of people would say, you know, they screwed up. I've been a parent. I know the problems.

Yeah, yeah. So, you know, because you later on had an academic background, I figured you're, you know, usually it implies one of, some love of reading somewhere and some parents, some experience with that. So there were books around the house, and your father obviously was, was, did they encourage you? What do they encourage, in terms of your own education, did they encourage you one way or another? Women were irrelevant. To both of them, for both, both your parents. Your encouragement.

My mom wanted me to be thin, beautiful, and competitive so I could capture a really good guy. Your brothers are older. Did they encourage them? What do your brothers do, by the way, or did they do? Every single one of us, actually, that's not true. The oldest one ended up, the oldest one was always a bit of an odd duck in terms of our family because, first of all, he was beyond a genius in terms of his IQ. He listened to classical music.

You know, he had a Venus flytrap in his groom. He had Ant Hills. I mean, he was just, you know, he was to his own drummer. He got an MBA and he went to work in banks. And he was never particularly happy. He was a wonderful writer. He did some writing stuff. He also went to Korea during the Vietnam War.

That was just by luck. And then my brother, Tony, was a very successful student and very successful athlete and was very socially conscious and went to an organization. It wasn't Teach for America. That's what we have now. It was another teacher. And so he did that, and then he left there, and eventually he got a degree, I don't know, sure, but it's a master's degree, but in counseling or something. But he has ended up being a coach to leaders.

Not far away from you. No, not far away at all. And my brother, Rob, who was very politically active, he was involved with John Gardner in getting his organization off the ground common cause. And then he got into direct mail as a way of raising money for liberal political candidates, worked on a number of presidential campaigns, also for organizations like the National Abortion, depending the name of it, National Organization of Women, the Abortion Organization. He raised a lot of money for the Southern Poverty Law Center. and then he as the nation turned to the right he went into the corporate world and became a

marketing expert and then he retired also at 55 because that was not his passion and he has continued to be politically active but as a private citizen okay well look were they and they're older i was just trying to think about what where you you obviously got interested at some point in education, even if your parents didn't push you or care so much about yours. Maybe did your brothers provide role models? What got you interested in? And I don't even know yet. I know you were a family therapist. I don't know where you were an undergraduate. I don't know if a family therapist for a short term. Let me get let me let me let me let me let me like you the lay of the land because I sure that's what I'm trying to get at. Yeah. So so I didn't want to go away to boarding

school because I was a you know a very socially connected to my friends. You know, we're in the neighborhood, the town next to New Cane in Norwalk. But I was sent away to boarding school. I was very grateful in retrospect. That's where my mind came alive. I went to Dana Hall, which is just outside of Boston. I had an English teacher by the name of Karen Kelly. I'm not sure if she's still around, but she was an extraordinary teacher.

And it was 1966, 67, 68, and she introduced me to African American literature. And I actually identified with the African-American experience because I was so marginalized in my own family. Oh, interesting. Okay. And so that was, you know, that was an incredible experience to see, you know, that there are people in the world who are marginalized but still have a voice, an extraordinary voice, and still have power and still can organize and still can make a difference. And so that was a big eye-opener. And then at the same time, I had a teacher who was also my housefather by the name of Bob Randolph, who went on to be the dean of students at MIT. And his wife, Jan, was my house mother.

And the two of them sort of took me under their wing. And Bob taught a course in political dynamics. And, you know, he would argue really tough arguing with me in the class. But he respected, it was argument based on respect, not on, I don't. I'm not listening to you. And so that was really incredible. And then there was a social studies teacher who I actually referenced in the book

when I talk about Pittsburgh at the beginning. John Schuller, who was a social studies teacher, and I think I mentioned that I got to be Tito for Yugoslavia. Yeah, yes. And I got interested in international relations and how nation states relate to each other. So I've always been somebody who can make connections between how the dynamics existed at my family dinner table

and the dynamics of Tito and Stalin, you know? I mean, the different levels of analysis always interested me. Yeah, well, that's great. In the young age. So that was where it all began. And then I went to, I went, I actually had a misadventure at the University of Denver for six months. I dropped out, but I met Joan Baez one night.

And I said, where the hell do I go to be politically active? make a difference. She goes, go to Boston. So I went to Boston. And I ended up at Boston University where I studied with Howard Zinn and a bunch of other great thinkers in American Studies. And I created my own program called Political Rights. It was a liberal American Studies program, sort of like a history, political science mix kind of thing. And writing and writing. I wanted to be a writer. That was, I always wanted to be a writer. So. Oh, you knew you wanted to be a writer. Okay. And so your undergraduate, okay, that's a different, then that's interesting because I, I didn't expect that as an undergraduate. That's great. So you're sort of politically active, interested

liberal arts degree with a lot of interesting people at BU, a place I know well and spent some time at myself. And then, but then you somehow did divert to be for a little while a family therapist. Well, this is, see, before, after my misadventure in Colorado and before I went to BU. I was living in Boston, and I started with two other people. I wasn't the driver behind it, but I was one of three people who started a program which is called a self-help program, which is organizing young people on the streets in the South End, some of whom were white kids who had run away from home and were living on the street, that kind of thing, and some of whom were African Americans living in South End, which at the time was predominantly African-Americans.

American before it was gentrified. And so we were working with young people trying to organize them and get them to take, empower them to take control of their lives and decide what they wanted to do. And it was a kind of community organizing program. And it was definitely cross race. And there was a lot of tension, obviously, across race. I was obviously I'm a white, I was a young white woman at the time. And it was very eye-opening. I grew up actually in a community that was somewhat integrated, so it wasn't like I'd never met black people before when I went to the South End at all. But this was a predominantly black community, and it was late 1960s, early 1970s. And that had a profound impact. And I really am horrified at how little people know about

American history and the role of African Americans in our history. It's stunning. to me. And luckily, because of Dana Hall and because of my experience at BU and because of my own interest, you know, from a very young age, I understood the African American experience and I understood the role of white people relative to African Americans in our country. And so as a result of that, it has always been obvious to me that you cannot get out of that history. As James Baldwin said, the history is not in the past. It lives on in the present. and all of us have been touched by that racial history. Yeah, yeah, well, we'll get there.

No, history impacts on all of us, but we do live in the president, some of us and not the past. And we have to recognize that. I think it's important that we address the president, as your book is all about doing, and we'll get there. But then you went back. I was asked by one of, I was, after BU, I was a journalist in a community newspaper, paper and I worked and I worked with I was hired by a coalition of self-help programs like the one I had worked in a coalition of self-help programs who are organizing to get resources diverted to communities so that communities could take control of their own communities and it was called

the mass area self-help coalition I was the editor of their newsletter and I was one of the writers who did a lot of the writing and one of the people who headed one of the programs said you should be working with kids. You have a gift. You should be working with kids. So when you leave here, I want you to come work in my program. It's an alternative community mental health program. We will give you all the training you need. And I was trained by David Cantor, one of the founders of family therapy and family therapy. That was only a part of what I did. I worked in groups with kids. I worked on the street. I worked in the schools. And I worked in their homes with their families. And this was a predominantly white community. And it was during busing. And so they were,

community was fighting busing. So I have as bookends working in an African-American community and that was struggling to, you know, to make something with their families, you know, to make something of their lives. And then a white community that was fighting busing. And that is the space between us right there. Yeah. Okay. Exactly. It's clear that I mean, that's why it's useful to learn this because this is all formative to where you, you know, to what you're being right. But you at some point decided to go back to school after being a journalist and then then going to the counseling program working with kids and families and seeing what they were up against both communities were economically disadvantaged and struggling and i and i had a friend at the time who was going to harvard

graduate school of education and he asked me to come with him to a lecture being given by carol gilligan who wrote a book called In a Different Voice. Yes. And it's an extraordinary book, extraordinary person. I went to the class. I said, I want more of this. So I applied to graduate school. And I had no desire to go working in organizations.

But my dad was looking over my shoulder while I was looking at the catalog. And he said, Chris Arjuris teaches there. And he said, he's one of three men who came through IBM. I had any respect for. I said, well, who are the others? He goes, Jay Forrester and Herb Slius. Simon. I hadn't heard of any of them. Now, of course, I know who they are. And so I said, okay, I'll take a course to Chris Ardress. So I went to Chris's course and Chris ended up being a

co-author and a mentor. In fact, interestingly enough, yeah, I was reading, that's how I learned a little bit about you by reading his Wikipedia page to see that he'd written something with you. Yes, yeah. And that's where I figured maybe, because I didn't know what your degree was in. Was it an organizational management or was it in? No, it was in a, everything I do is interdisciplinary. This was a little odd disciplinary program called, they called a consulting psychology, but what it did is it studied systems at different levels of analysis, from individuals to groups, to families, to organizations, to communities, and looked at how systems worked, how they broke down, and how you can change them. And so they had people who represented

each of those units of analysis, a community psychologist and family, a group, and Chris Ardress was the organizational guy, okay? And I got interested in organizations because I felt like the individual work I was doing with people, you know, was just too small, but I felt like the political work I had done in the end of the 60s, early 70s was too large, and organizations felt just about right. So in fact, and your career since that time has been working with organizations consulting with them on how to apply strategic planning, organizational psychological work on thinking about differences and how to do strategic change, basically.

That's what you've been working with. Although a lot of the times, the way I think about it is I've always been interested in whether it's a family, a community, an organization, or a nation, interested in intergroup conflict. and how it ends up harming everything. I mean, talk about dark energy. I mean, I was chuckling about your last podcast. I discovered dark energy, too.

Yeah, a lot of dark energy. But so the difficulty is once that intergroup conflict takes place, it cuts off the growth of individuals because you no longer learn. you're just stuck in your own little group and there's no growth, there's no learning. It also cuts off the growth and the adaptation of the organization because people are so busy fighting against themselves. They can't solve common problems.

And then probably the most dangerous is that the relationships those entities have with external, like their competitors, their customers, those get into trouble because they become so focused on their internal insanity, which all of this I saw taking place in our nation. And I said, look, you know, what I learned there applies here. And the question is, is how do you convert intergroup conflict into a force for change by helping people see that what they are doing when they engage in this kind of intense intergroup polarized conflict, they are harming their own self-interest, not just the interest of the system. Absolutely. In fact, well, you did the segue for me.

It was, you know, clearly you were ripe with a political interest and an experience of trying to help people bridge differences to write a book, which is called remaking the space between us, how citizens can work together to build a better future for all. And as I said, I heard about the book. I must admit, I was a little skeptical, and as I am about everything. I don't blame you. I would have been too. And I, you know, and I read it.

And I have to say, it was only on, page, I kept asking myself the question, what caused her to write this book? And then on page 96, a little over halfway through the book, I finally got, I found, there's finally a quote, and I want to read it because it'll be a good way to segue. So this is when you're talking about something which we'll get to later, which is problems in Congress, and my goodness, there are many of them. And you talked about one group that had been, that have been working to try and bridge the differences between Republicans and Democrats. The RCI worked to fix Congress. and you said you'd tell colleagues about it and they'd say that's great how can I help

and at first I found the response irritating you know they said good luck it was as if they saw no role for themselves in either creating or in changing a reality they just made hopeless by declaring it hopeless then I realized we have all turned into potted plants until we see an option better than sitting on a shelf waiting to get watered until we see a way to make a difference like those on the select committee did what should I expect That's when I decided to write this book. I wanted people to know that, despite the large, defeatist, sensationalist approach of 24-hour cable TV and social media, there are plenty of options out there for making a difference with all sorts of people in all sorts of places.

All you have to do is get off the shelf and join them. Full speed ahead, cynicism be damned. And it was there, and I thought, well, now I understand what got you into it. And I think that's a wonderful introduction, I think, which I read it later on. The book is all about, which is how to get citizens to get off the shelf and the kind of tools that you've used and the sort of experiences you have about the obstacles to that. And I was pleased, so I want to go through. I've made a lot of notes, as you can see from when I do anyway, and I want to pick out

various points in the book and ask you about them. I was very pleased to see that the book begins with our evolutionary legacy. because I'm a big proponent of evolutionary psychology, and it's important. It's an understanding ourselves, both good and bad. And you point out, of course, that evolutionarily we have a great background for competition and to some extent cooperation, and you say clearly the potential for both lies within us. But at least at this stage in our evolution, cooperation and empathy are much more likely

to flourish within groups while competition, even hate, is much more likely to break out across groups. So you want to elaborate on that a little bit? Sure. Well, if we go back to our evolutionary history, the reason why people formed groups in the first place, because they didn't always exist, was so that they could do a better job of surviving. I mean, they weren't thinking socialism. They were thinking, I got to survive. So they formed these groups. They formed group identities. they started to differentiate themselves from other groups, and they did all that so they could compete against other groups. And then, you know, sometime in the 1700s,

when we start trying to create democracies and think about the natural state of man, we assume that that stage of our evolution is the nature of man, as opposed to, well, maybe it's just a stage of evolution. Maybe there's another step we can take, because that, by the way, was the second step. step we took. So you can't say it is the natural state of man because it wasn't before we took that step. So it just isn't logical. So we could potentially take another step. But one of the

things I think we're up against is that people are despair about our ability to do it. And I think what they don't see is two things. One is the problems we face today go across groups. You cannot solve them within one group. Whether it's a pandemic, it's migration, it's climate change. All of those require groups to reach some kind of consensus like the Paris Agreement in 2015, some kind of agreement on how you're going to tackle the problem. No one group can do it alone. So literally our survival depends on learning to take another evolutionary step, which is to go and cooperate across groups. And so, you know, one of the things I think people often think about when think about cooperation is you're such a socialist okay this isn't an ideological argument this is

a survival argument okay and it's a self-interest argument um and so you know that that is where i've been trying to help people to understand that at a at a in our democracy we are now since the 1960s a multi-group democracy and the demographics are such that white people are not the overwhelming majority there we have multiple groups with a seat at the table demographic groups i'm not talking ideologies now those demographic groups do not live together those demographic groups are separated from one another and that is a significant problem because it's very difficult to create cooperation across groups if you do not understand one another you don't appreciate their experience you can't benefit from their background and by the way i mean forget you know gee it's nice to work across

differences, we actually need to understand what these people, you know, in different groups are up against, okay, because we can't solve a problem unless we understand that, okay? So this is a pragmatic perspective from my point of view, not an ideological, even moral one, although I think there is a moral argument, an ideological argument for both. It's simply you cannot solve the problem without the data and the experience of people from these different groups. So that and in a multi-group democracy we basically have to do that or the democracy will not survive okay that's a that's a great intro to this and and in fact yeah and the book is full of examples of people who work to do things plus i assume your own experience and and also historical examples and which i was like i i mean i you know

one can make truisms or or or but it doesn't really but but you know the the saying what would be ideal and is irrelevant if you can't look at what's already happened. And I like it. Exactly. Yeah. And, and, um, but you do make a statement early on, which I think is, which is obviously responsible for the title. Closing the distance across groups then requires us to open up the space within groups. Absolutely. Elaborate on what you mean by that. Yeah. And it's something that gets overlooked again and again and again and again. And even when I do interviews and everything, everybody else, let's, let's bridge the divides. Let's bridge the divides. You can't do that. if the perspective with which you approach bridge building is so insular as it is.

And one of the case examples that's in the book that you're aware of having read it so closely is Derek Black, who was a white nationalist, okay? How is he going to ever, I mean, how could he ever reach across a divide if he didn't first open up the mental space within his own group? Okay. And he actually was the one from whom I appropriated the term mental space because he was on a podcast and he was talking about what it was like growing up in a white nationalist community. And he said, you know, we never thought about other people. We just thought about reaffirming everything that we believed and telling everybody we were right. We never thought about what our impact. I mean, it was essentially he said a small mental space. And Ulysses S. Grant also talked about that when he talked about the poor whites. in the South, aligning with the slave owners, which was against their interest. But he talked about the existence of a firm feeling amongst this class of people. It's the same thing. If you're that insular, it's really hard to reach across the divide because all you're going to do is reject what the other person's saying.

Absolutely. I mean, there's lots of examples about that space is that intellectual space between us in many ways, I guess. And it's also sometimes geographical. And you, I mean, sorry, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but it's the mental space within groups and it's the geopolitical distance across groups. Okay, great. And we'll go through both. Yeah, yeah. So that's fine.

Please interrupt me whenever you want because I tend to do the same. And although I've been trying not as the more podcasts I do, the more I try not to try not to. People complain. In any case, I think that's what, however, however discussions are often go that way. Anyway, you talk here about, and it's important to realize that there are forces that drive us closer to people like us and further away from people unlike us that increase the divisiveness and polarization that's, as you say, it's weak in our nation. And after all, I mean, this is a useful, this is a particularly useful time to have this discussion because the polarization is so significant and we're in the middle of a national election. But you say, let me, you list these things. say forces that turn differences into divides.

We share a history in which groups are sorted and ranked, according to their, quote, innate characteristics. Two, we all inherited from this history a set of cultural beliefs that lead us to think of groups more or less consciously in lesser, better, zero-sum terms. That history and culture produced segmented hierarchical institutions that shape the way we think. We fall prey at various times to unconscious biases,

cognitive biases, and we all have psychological defenses that protect their identities. And of course, you talk about those. But of these sort of four or five forces, which do you think is the most challenging? That's interesting, which is the most, I always think as a change agent, I'm almost thinking about where's the best lever.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, but let's think about that. That's a good question. I think, let me see, which would be the most challenging? you know they're all challenging in their own way can i say a little bit about the challenge that's fine and by the way my my standard answer to this question is i never think hierarchically it's they're all important so fine if you do that too yeah i mean i i'll let me think about i think there's a challenge that's that each one presents and then the question is what's the

lever you know that will allow us to not be a captive to these things okay because we're we tend to be captive to these forces and you know the forces will never go away so how do we free ourselves so anyway so the you know history we are a product of our history but um people tend to be unaware of that and we have an educational system which does us a disservice because it doesn't teach history um in a way that we can really understand where we are today and so the number of times people have said oh my god the country's so polarized today it's never been like this before and I go huh I mean, I was alive during the last time. So I don't even have to read a history book, okay?

But there's one very big difference between today's polarization and historical polarization, although this, I don't think this was true. What I'm about to say probably wasn't true in the 1850s prior to the Civil War. But I would say in the 60s and 70s, we were somewhat tethered to reality. Okay. And it was very polarized, but I think people agreed facts existed. and they had a place in the discourse. It wasn't until, you know, the latter part of the 1900s

and the early part of the 2000s, that facts got kicked out of the room. The postmodernist wave. Yeah, exactly, yeah. But so history, you know, we don't teach it well. We don't understand it well. Culture, the trouble with culture is it's such an amorphous topic, and I have a lot of thoughts on culture, which I won't go into.

But people tend to think of culture and super, official terms like what are the espoused beliefs and values of a culture and an organization or a nation, you know, so like in the United States, you know, freedom and justice, liberty, justice, and for all. But then there's a deep culture, which is the norms and how people actually construct the world around them and interact and take action. And that deep culture we've learned it's, you know, win, don't lose, zero sum, you know, that's how we operate. So even though we have very different views politically about what ought to happen and we disagree about it we are an absolute alignment on how to disagree and that's our culture okay that's culture all right so we we point

counterpoint debates push your view you know oh you know belittle the other view um blame them for why we're not making progress all of that is cultural learning okay and you you would you get that through your families, your schools, you know, it's through osmosis. And then institutions are built on all of this, right? I mean, they don't come out of nowhere. They're product of history and culture. And so, and our evolutionary legacy. So you have institutions, and we've been trying to break out of this, and I know this,

because I studied organizations for a long time. We've been trying to break out of the hierarchical nature of organizations because everybody knows that the limitation of that is you can't adapt as quickly. Okay. But the trouble is, is that people haven't yet learned to cooperate across groups. We'll stop. And because of that, functions across an organization can't solve problems together. So they send the conflict up the hierarchy to the person in power. And then that person gets more power, which causes more competition amongst groups. So that's a challenge. And when it comes to institutions is how do you reinvent institutions if people don't know how to, cooperate across groups and they don't know how to cooperate across groups because they have this

cultural learning of when don't lose zero sum which is a product of their history and but then you know you could go okay well maybe people could become aware of this and they could change it but they got these cognitive blinders okay and so you know they they don't see their role they only see what the other person's doing okay and they have implicit biases based on you know our racial learning as we grow up or gender learning and then you know but people could point this out like you know hey you know I think you might have a bias here you're just looking for confirming data but that then upsets their self-esteem and their identity so they had these emotional and psychological defenses that lead them to say screw you you don't know what you're talking about so you put these five together and it's

tough but I have worked I have chipped away at this for a lifetime okay and so I'll tell you one thing it is infinitely doable and the only thing that makes it not doable is the belief it is not doable but i have lots of data and i'm talking tape recording data over years watching people transform their history their culture their biases and the way they do it is by building relationships with people who will help them learn because they're going to be helped to learn who will point out your blindnesses in a way that doesn't say you're a racist little schmuck and you should go home and shoot yourself. They do it in a way that says we're all in this together. We all have our blindnesses. We all, pardon my language, suck one way or another. We're going to have to help each other

out of this. Okay. In fact, well, I think that's that's a key factor. And we're going to see several examples of that. But I think the fact that you have experience, and in fact, well, I'll get to this later because often, well, in fact, the next quote from yours, I'm going to say it sounds good, but is it possible? I think that, but your point here, which you reinforce later and later throughout the book, which is really important, which is, you know, to paraphrase Roosevelt, the only thing we have to, the only failure we can expect is the failure we expect. Oh, that's great. Yeah, okay, you can use it.

Yeah, I like that. Yeah. And, but okay, the next quote of yours, which, which again, I made a note saying sounds good, but is it possible. Most important something today is to shift from fighting against one another over past and present grievances to fighting with one another for a future that's better for us all. That sounds good, and I agree it's a goal, but you would say you believe it's possible, obviously. I don't believe it's possible if it was simply a belief, why the hell should you listen to me? Exactly. No, no, no. There are hundreds of thousands of people right now working in communities doing exactly that. I mean, they are doing it, okay?

And so, but let me ask you a question. I'm going to come back to this because I do want to talk about what people are doing. Okay. So please don't let me forget in my dotage here I might, okay? But why is it that everyone always starts with, is it possible as opposed to that's interesting? How can we do that? I mean, literally everyone responds for 40 years. Uh-huh, yeah, well, I'm a little cynical.

Is it possible? Seriously, what is that about? I don't think I think people remember being discouraged and trying this and sort of being fresh-faced and and saying oh yeah anything's possible or you know this can happen and then having one experience of learning of seeing all those obstacles that you've just discussed and seeing them in in action and asking and then looking around at a world which fair enough which always appears to be in disarray and I have to say it's always. always, you know, the present time always appears to be a disarray in the past we can look at as not, but at the time it was probably in disarray for those people then, too. So you look around at these global problems, and you say, what can I do? And I think, and the book is neat because we, you talk about specifically about how we can try and address some of these global problems.

Let's stay with what you said, if we could for a moment, Lawrence. Sure. Because it's really important. Yeah. No, I mean, I think what you said is so important, which is, you know, people, have tried and then they failed and they look around and they see how many other people are failing and they say, you know, they're discouraged, okay, which is totally understandable. And I think, you know, several things are happening simultaneously. One is I think people would like a simpler

answer than is available. And so when I say, though, these five forces, people go, oh my God, they're five forces. Oh, can't you give me something simple? Like, what do I say to John next tomorrow? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I said, yeah, I can give you that. it's not going to work and you'll get even more discouraged because it won't work okay so i think part of it is we haven't had a complex enough understanding of what's wrong and what needs fixing that's one of the reasons i wrote the book and i by the way tried to make it very accessible so i didn't give the diagrams and the models and the other kind of stuff but you could but it's a complicated problem okay so that's one and people want a simple solution i'm empathetic but i also want to say you know

do you want to feel good or do you want to be better and get good and have better results? If you want the latter, then it's going to require you to be thinking about all five of those factors. So that's one. And again, people, you know, have a hard time with it. Secondly, those people who have tried the simpler approaches have failed and they have gotten discouraged. And I'm very sympathetic. Okay. And so one of the things I've done in my other work is come up with stage theories so that people don't think something's going to change overnight. So when it comes to changing relationships or changing organizations, I talk about three stages of change. The first one is you just start to try out new actions that are different from the cultural actions you're

taught. So if the cultural action you've been taught us to always push your view, then you're going to start out instead by sharing your view and inquiring into others' views. Okay, that's just You just learn how to do that, okay? What that does is it generates new information that you've never had before because you've never actually asked people to talk about their experience, okay? That then pushes you into a second stage, which I call framing, where you reframe how you see yourself relative to the world and the people around you. And that then leads to some other consequences that you've never, results you've never had

before, which pushes you into a third stage, which is one where you actually reorient towards how the world works and how you orient towards other groups and so on. So people need to understand that change doesn't happen overnight and that they have to do it in the context of relationships and that they have to help one another. There's certain principles. And we don't have that in our culture. And I'm sorry to be leaving this planet before I can spread this further because I actually believe, you know, the things I was able to stand on the shoulders of brilliant people, and I've been able to integrate it in a way that I think could be helpful. Now, I do think it's possible. Do I think it's probable? Well, we're running out

of time, so I'm not making a bet. That's what I was going to, well, later on, if we get there, I'm just asking, what's about that reading that's I asked, is it too late at some point in one question? But, but let's, so you talk about individuals, but so the next, the, the, the, The next thing you point about is the nation is trapped. And, I mean, individuals are trapped by their psychology. Nations are trapped by many things. And you have a quote here, neither war nor words have yet to resolve our identity crisis, trapping us in a chronic state of conflict that leaves us unprepared for and unequal to the demands of the 21st century.

Take it from there. expand. I mean, this is one reason why I get so bemused by we're so polarized now. We've been polarized over this question literally from the moment we set foot on this continent. Okay. We had a set of really wonderful, my husband one time put it, we had these extraordinarily inspirational set of ideals which we implemented through a program. genocide in one of his in one of his more macabre moments you know we the the gap between what we were aspiring towards and what we were actually creating was casmic but in fact let me interrupt you for a second because there's another I was going to do another quote along with it and it just hits that exact argument let me have you comment on both so there's the quote we just had we're unprepared

and you say as long as we maintain a gaping distance in our minds and in our realities among demographically and ideologically diverse groups, and between who we say we are and who we really are, we will continue to create different images, subscribe to different narratives, and promote different identities as a nation, some of our flag, some of its shadow. So I think, I want you to comment on both those. Okay, well, it's, it's, it's, you know, we, those who talk about the dark side of our history in a way that evokes shame prevents people from looking clear-eyed at our history. And so I would rather take a more, and maybe this comes from my psychological background, a more clinical view, a more historical view, more contextual view of how is it

that a group of men, white men, could come to this nation to create a country, liberty and justice for all while instituting slavery you know i mean that is a stunning okay how did it happen so i tried to figure that out i'm sorry what's that great cognitive dissonance there yeah yeah exactly and um you know at the time um you know colonialism was afoot um there was it was the the the age of so-called enlightenment when people were you know uh embracing analysis or rational analysis. And yet there was this self-interest in essentially in slavery and colonialism. So how do you justify it? Okay. And so there was this racial hierarchy idea, which by the way, I think is a product of our evolutionary history to think that way. Okay. And so they put people

of color low on the hierarchy and white people high on the hierarchy. And therefore, they could justify saying, well, white people can be free because people who are, as a professor Assanti said, you know, they're chattel. I mean, they're not even, they wouldn't even reach the status of human beings, okay? And, you know, that's a horrifying thought. And it's how it happened. It's also how it happened. Okay. Now, what people overlook who, who recognize this reality, which was a reality, is that there were a good number of people also in, in America at the time, who opposed slavery. And they were both white and black. And they fought very hard against slavery. That also was true from the time we were founded. There were people who really thought that that was bad.

It was wrong. It was against our ideals. And so there was a big conflict between those groups going back to the 1600s. I'm not talking, you know, 1700s, okay? And but because they couldn't resolved their conflict. These two groups couldn't resolve their conflict. Slavery then was allowed to get embedded in the South in its economic structure and it became a multi-million dollar industry so that by the time we convened to talk about the Constitution, you had a profound economic self-interest that was going to have to get dismantled for the country to go forward. And so the first of many devil's bargains were made around race in order to institute the Constitution. And one of the things, and this gets overlooked, it's my favorite sentence in the book, is if a small group of

white men, okay, do you remember this? Do you, do you? Well, I circle the quote. I don't know whether it was white men, but it's the quote from Morgan Mead, which I have outlined, and I was going to get, I was going to turn to it. What is it? It's a very important quote. Save that quote, because I want to talk about that in the context of real change. If a small group of homogenous men can create an idea, it's an idea, it's just an idea, it's an idea that then enslaved millions of people. Oh, that quote. Okay, sorry.

Okay, then perhaps a more heterogeneous, pluralist group of citizens can come up with an idea that sets us all free. In other words, we're constructing this, okay? So we can reconstruct it. But the problem with the Constitution is that once that was signed, once they signed in something that legitimated slavery, then they legitimated a racial hierarchy. And it got embedded in our legal structure. It got embedded in our culture, in our economic structure. And then that becomes very difficult, not impossible, but very difficult to change.

And we've been migrating, actually until recently, in a very positive direction. But then, wo and behold, you know. We've been moving, well, I mean, by fits and spurts. But I think that I think the undercurrent of what of the problems we're experiencing now has been around. It's just maybe it wasn't so obvious. And, you know, we're going to get to, I mean, I think the first part of the, let me just say, the first part I think of the book and our discussion is sort of the problems. and then I want to talk about

examples of where things have worked and how they have worked in which you talk about which I think is you know you do say you ask an interesting question which I think is once again not necessarily optimistic but not

but basically saying if we don't if we don't if we don't know the willingness to believe in a better future won't happen you say what kind of society will a belief create if people act upon it as if it is true

and is that the kind of society we want you want to want to come in on that yeah um what was the context that that was an important context yeah yeah that was in the that was in um that was in the context of we're all prisoners and wardens we where we all um we're basically we're trapped we're you're still in the part of discussion where we're trapped in our in our in our beliefs in our and our and our and our minds and um and um and and you talk and it's that following the story of Trevor um a white man who died oh yeah yeah beliefs um you know and it's part of a there's a great there's a it follows a great but it's part of a chapter which i out which i also

along the title of called the staying power of a discredited belief and i think that's really important right now is that incorrect beliefs are really hard to get you get over as a scientist. I spend most of them, and as a teacher, I spend most of my time actually using discredited beliefs because, or discrediting them, in fact, people don't want to give up the notion that even 400 years after Galileo people don't want to, or Newton, we've been at Galileo, in fact, people don't want to give up the notion that heavier objects fall faster than lighter ones. Right, right. And so, and so it's easy to see how, how people don't want to give up their beliefs, even when they're manifestly wrong.

And the challenge is, you can tell them they're wrong, but as a teacher, that doesn't work. People have to discover the whole point of it is to confront your own misconceptions, is to realize it yourself, and how do you get to the point where people can confront their own misconceptions? Yeah. It's a challenge. Yeah. And especially because it does, it can raise up defenses.

but I thought that quote came up when people, I was talking about it's on, if you want, it's on page 27, but yeah, let me just, because I think it's, it's, on page which? 27. 27, okay. You're talking about, I mean, in this case, you know, I think you're talking about, you know,

bad beliefs, which are, you know, beliefs that are, that are, you know, some groups are in the inferior, And so I think, I think, you know, people who act on bad beliefs produce a society that inevitably is bad in one way or another. Yeah, I mean, so, but I think one of the, I think here I was trying to get at is on some of these values or beliefs, it's not like you can disconfirm them once and for all. So, okay, so then the question is, so how do you scrutinize a. belief or value if it's if it's not amenable to disconfirmation in a laboratory or fact yeah and how do you discredit it and so that's when you have to ask yourself okay if we were to act on this belief that's what it was around the hierarchy if we were to act on this belief as if it was true

what kind of society would we create and would we want that society and so if you look historically at the societies that have been created on that belief, it's slavery. Yeah. And it's the Holocaust. A few people would want that society. So if you don't want that society, then you better think about those beliefs because it's the logical conclusion of where your belief will lead you. Okay. So it's a way of critiquing a belief independent of facts. It's, it's, you see what I'm saying? Yeah. Uh-huh. Okay. Does that make? Makes sense? Yeah, yeah, okay. I mean, I think that's important that people are locked in and you don't think of the consequences of that. Here's another quote of yours that follows up that in a different way. The vast majority of us believe so much in the categories we impose on others that it would never occur to us to give them a moment's thought. The only suspiciousness we demonstrate towards categories is for those that others impose upon us. Yes, yeah, yeah. And that is a big problem. because we do impose categories on people constantly, every day, every day.

All of us, left, right. I mean, you know, I'm definitely not on the right. I have a lot of friends who are on the left. And I listen to the way in which they talk about people on center right or the right. And I think to myself, we are absolutely replicating exactly what we are saying. We don't want to see. and we're seeing it over and over again and I think that that's the space between us but they will say but we're not as bad as them yeah it doesn't matter it's not a quantitative game

it's a qualitative game it's the quality of our thinking it's the quality of our actions that are getting us into trouble the fact that we're all doing it is a quantity issue not that one group does it more than the other well and then okay and another part of this you say is perhaps it is expecting so little of so many for so long that has brought us to where we are today, our complacency in terms of... I'm convinced, that's true. I mean, I mean, I think we expect very little as citizens. Well, and but then you point out, I think you're constantly pointing out here that the dangers of

inaction are often greater than the actions. We cannot afford to delegate the future of our... democracy especially when we the people have the power to do something we are uniquely positioned to do so i think you know this is a call to action i guess i'm beginning to see it is a call to action because look we're not going to elect other officials as long as we the people live in these separate groups and are divided as we are it's not possible because the elected officials are catering to us okay now we have a triangle here we have the press which has now become much more extremist, okay? We have people who've become extremists and we have politicians who become extremist.

And those three self-reinforce each other. As a citizen who isn't able to control the press or what politicians do, I want to talk to other citizens like me and say, let's start with us. Because if we start with us, they can't divide us. The press can't divide us. Politicians can't divide us. If we don't allow ourselves to be divided, if we bring ourselves together and refuse to be divided, we cannot be manipulated the way we have been manipulated for 300 years. And you say that, again, going back to history, that history tells us that citizens who shirk their responsibility for preserving democracy do so at their own risk. And I think this is, I mean, we're seeing this now. And in fact, I've just added a book a little bit about some of these

subjects, that, you know, that if we shirk our responsibility, it's been easy to imagine, I lived in U.S. for most of my life, that, well, this can never happen here. And people are now beginning to ask the question, can this happen here? And is it, and will it happen if people shirk their risk, shirk their responsibility for preserving it? Yeah. I think they are and I think people now are saying can it not can we avoid it happening here it's the first time in my life that i've heard people seriously question whether that was likely to whether democracy was likely to fall in the united states and and um just i think some people would have said whether or whatever was but but those were the cynic people and you know there's some aspects of democracy they're manipulated

but for the first time this is really a question that and and that's why i think it's timely to discuss exactly how the techniques that separate us as individuals can be applied to trying to reduce the separations of us as citizens and the country. You say one thing we've all learned, and you said this before, the one thing we all agree on is how to disagree. All of us learn from experience some version of the following strategies when hot conflicts break out and our hot systems kick in. One, fight for our side to win.

two, lobby for our preferred solution discounting or ignoring adverse effects on others. Three, use point-counterpoint scripts with more or less hostility or civility when debating. Four, view our adversarial role as a necessary response to others' adversarial

roles. Five, see others as more responsible than us for any impasse or stalemate. And six, think of others as mad or bad and ourselves as sane, tame, and not to blame. I got a little carried away there. Yeah, well, okay.

But it's a useful set of realizations of the tools that people use, that we have these built-in set of tools that get in the way of even having dialogue. Do you want to call it? I mean, they're clear on their own. Do you want to add anything to that? Yeah, I mean, the only thing I would say is that I think we see it so clearly when other people do that, but we don't see it in ourselves. Or if we see it in ourselves, we justify it. We say, well, I had to do that. okay i mean i spent the first 10 years of my career um when i would go into an organization i would

tape record meetings so i could illustrate exactly what people were doing to get into trouble and i would go to john and say well john you know i noticed that in this meeting you know you you're pushing your view and you know blah blah you know what if you were to i'd be happy to do that but there's what do i do with steve okay because steve is just going to use that and exploit me okay so i trundled down the hall and I talk to Steve and I go, Steve, you know, what if you were to do this with John, you know, and he'd be glad to do that with John, but what if John, okay? So this is when I learned and this is what was distinctive about my practice is I never coached individual leaders. I got John and Steve in a room together. This is partly my family therapy

background, okay? I got John, Steve, and Mark in the room together, okay? And I would look, not at their personalities, which is what most coaches do and what most people do, I would look at the pattern of interaction that they each created that was getting in the way of solving problems they wanted to solve. So they had a self-interest. Each of them had a self-interest in changing that pattern. And then you convert what is a stuck, you know, they're completely stuck in these patterns, okay? You convert that into a force for change because all All of a sudden, all three of them are working to change the pattern together because they know it's in their interest. And that's what we have to do as a nation is understand the pattern amongst these groups.

The pattern is insular within, distant to cross. It's killing us. We need to change it. We can change it becoming less insular within and less distant to cross. It's really, really. In fact, that's, again, a good segue, because in the later section where you talk about a problem, you and I can solve, you say you recap, and this is, and this is, recaps what we've talked about, the majority of us continue to live within closed, insular, like-minded groups, and to distance ourselves from groups that are different from us, making it easier for us to fear, hate, and compete with one another rather than empathize and cooperate with one another. And then you have a table saying action steps citizens can take. And I'll read the title of the four steps and you can elaborate, okay?

One, except that what brought us to where we are today can take us no further, first one. Secondly, create more space within groups and less across groups. Three, be on the lookout for cultural beliefs, cognitive biases, and emotional defenses that drive us closer to those like us and further away from those different forms. from us. And four, help one another to see what we cannot see so we can all do better. So maybe we'll elaborate. Let's take the first one, except what was brought us to where we are today can take us no further. Yeah, I think we, I remember when back in the 1980s and 1990s, when with the fall of the Soviet Union, they talked about it's the end of history, okay?

I mean, I think we think wherever we are is sort of as far as we're going to go. Or it's a straight, like Lee Drupman once said this. It's a great insight that the trend we're on is going to continue, okay? But history has never confirmed any of that, okay? So I think what we need to realize is that, yeah, okay, so we've gotten to a point where we've gotten very good at cooperating within groups and competing against groups. Our survival now requires us to cooperate across groups to solve the nature of today's problems. if we don't, the planet will literally be polluted to death and climate change, everything else.

Okay, so we've got a real incentive to do that. And so that's number one. We have to realize that the current state of evolution where we're at now doesn't work in a multi-group democracy, doesn't work in a multi-nation world with problems that transcend boundaries. So that's the first one. And then creating more space within groups

than less across groups. You want to talk about that? And that's a really important one. And I think it's really hard for people to, you know, to get their heads around this. But I think everybody understands that we all go to our own news sources. Yeah. That when something upsetting happens, I reach out to Amy and I say, can you believe this jerk? You know, what the hell are you thinking, okay?

And so we have our little collusion clicks, you know, and we read the same books and we, you know, go to the same movies. and the mental space is very small. So the question is, how do you reach out beyond it? So I've made a concerted effort, and it is not, I mean, it does not, it's not that it's time-consuming, by the way. It's just you have to be conscious of it. Yeah. Okay.

Conscious about, you know, making friendships and not distancing from people whose political views are different from mine. But I don't start, I don't hang out and talk about our political differences. I just hang out like I would a friend. I mean, you know, you don't just. just jump into your political differences with a friend. I mean, you say, how are your family? And I think we need to develop demographically diverse groups.

So we need to do that. If we can't do that, if that's hard to do, then we can read and watch films. Like, you know, for white folk, I'd strongly recommend, if you want to understand the African-American experience, I'd strongly recommend I Am Not Your Negro, which is a documentary based on James Baldwin. And these are very easy. These are, you know, entertainment, you know. And then the other one is the hate you give. We should be watching things that bring us into groups that are different from our own, okay?

I don't have to recommend African American communities how to find out about the white experience because it's the dominant experience on TV, okay? But the quality of the conversation, on the other hand, can be very different amongst groups once they become, once they get face to face with each other. So I think that is, it's very important for people to open up the mental space within their group because once they do that, then it's much easier to build relationships across groups. But the other thing is in the book, I list it, and I'm going to mention them now, Listen First Project has a list of organizations across the country that are bridging divides and helping people open the space within. So starts with us. It's on the Internet.

It starts with us. They will send you an exercise every day, okay, to open up the space within your own head, okay? Okay, and related to that, I guess it leads into the number three, be on the lookout for culture, beliefs, cognizance, and emotional offenses that drive us closer to those like us and further away from those that are different from us. I guess, be on the lookout by opening yourself up to different views. And asking for help from people and saying, I mean, I would, oh, I would. often say, you know, if you see me doing things that suggest I'm trying to push my view too hard, I have a tendency to do that. I grew up in a competitive family, you know, sorry. Would you please point it out? I would find that not critical. I find it helpful. I would find it very

helpful. So you invite people to let you know, to see what you don't see. That's number four. Yeah. And that's, and that's a crucial, open yourself up for that. Yeah. But okay. And then, so those are techniques and those are important tools. One thing you said a quote that I want to read that resonate with me, he said, does not take all of us. It takes just enough of us across different groups to inspire a discouraged nation to work together on building a better future. The reason it's resonating for me is I ran a program and when I ran an institute in my last university and we talked about fear of others. a whole, there was a whole workshop on that, but we, but and, and, and, and, and, uh, it's

pointed out there's a lot of research in any, any, any system, any group of people that if three percent, uh, if three percent of the citizens, you know the study, if three, no, this is really an amazing study. If you look at successful, more or less revolutions or within a society, if three percent of the people in a group actively, not just believe something, not just wants something, but actively work towards doing that, three percent is all that's ever been required to basically turn the whole group around. You've got to send me the reference to this. This is amazing.

Now, I mean, the thing that worries me and excites me about that number is the right has organized themselves. Yeah. Okay. So we have to, what I call the 67% who are more flexible and pragmatic need to not seed the political ground to extremists, okay? No, as James Baldwin said, it takes passion, not numbers. Absolutely.

And we'll get to that quote that I thought you were leading to from Margaret Mead, which I think is an important one. Oh, yeah, all it takes is for a few committed people. In fact, I think it was in this, no, it wasn't there. It's later on, but I love that quote. I love that quote too. Yeah. Yeah.

And, okay. But you talk about, you now give one of the first, well, there are a few, but the first examples of us kind of successful effort. And it has to do with Billings, Billings, Montana. Wow, what a story. I want to talk about that. Yeah, I love that story. And I want to give a shout out to Patrice O'Neill and Ream Miller, who were two. independent filmmakers who are the ones who allow us to be able to tell that story. But it was the 1990s in Billings, Montana, and there were a series of three hate crimes that occurred. The first one was people vandalized the outside of a Native American home. They put a swat stick, painted a swat stick on the home. I think they wrote the word die. It was really nasty. And then some skinheads intimidated the congregants of an African American church. And then the third is a Jewish boy put a menorah in his window at Hanukkah and somebody threw a brick through the window.

Okay. And so the town organically mobilized in each instance. So the local painters union, I think his name is Randy Seamus, he talks about it, painted over the house of the Native American home free of charge just went there as a way of signaling to the people who did this not in our town and when he was asked about why he did it he was sort of puzzled and he said well that's just what we do in Montana we you know we help our neighbors don't they do that elsewhere and then the african-american church their white neighbors started accompanying them to church so that the skinheads were discouraged from continuing to be there. And then the local newspaper published a menorah, a picture of menorah in their paper,

and people hung it in their windows. And so what happened is Patrice O'Neill and Ria Miller went and interviewed people and did a documentary on what happened, which became a PBS documentary, which you can find on Google. It's called Not in Our Town. Yeah. And she did the film, and then she went back to Oakland, California, where she lived, and she showed the film in the Bay Area.

And people who came to the film were law enforcement, faith leaders, educators, regular citizens, you know, a cross-section of communities. And after the film was shown, she said, so what do you think of Billings? And people said, I don't want to talk about Billings. I want to talk about our town. I want to talk about what we're doing. Are we creating communities where there's enough of a sense of belonging across groups, where we're inclusive enough so that we're safe, so that people don't want to do these things,

okay? And that is a fundamental question, okay? It's not just getting rid of the bad guys, okay? It's are we creating a community in which people aren't isolates and left alone to suffer and get goofy, okay? And so she then showed the film to, I think, 100 town halls across the country. And now there are thousands of chapters of not in our town across the country. And if you go on the internet and plug in, not in our town,

you'll see that the organization has all these resources that you can use to build communities of belonging. and they have law enforcement, faith leaders, films, community groups. I mean, it's extraordinary. And by the way, that's where you have the quote, never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Yeah. It is the only thing that ever has.

Yeah. Now, then there's another. positive example that you actually used, which is kind of interesting, of a woman, Sharon McMahon, and which, which it arises, I mean, she's a teacher.

And you initiated with a quote, which I kind of like, which you said, the totalitarianism that arose in Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia was not the problem. It was the most horrific solution to a problem confronting all of humanity, how to live in a plurality. world. And you talk about an example of a woman who's a high school teacher, a former high school teacher who's created a site that has been fairly successful. And you say her secret sauce

is her, quote, use of verifiable facts, genuine questions, balanced reasoning, and authentic conversation offered up in an effort to learn and help and to help not convince cajole or castigate. You want to talk about her site because it'll come up again? Sure. And it's just keeps growing and growing and she's become quite a personality. And if people are really interested in this, I would go to the Instagram site that she has called Sharon Says So. She was an ex-government history teacher. She got pissed off one day when she saw a guy talking about the Electoral College and completely distorting what it was about. She had already retired as a teacher and she had launched a crafts business, which she had on Instagram showing people how to use crafts. And so when she

got really annoyed, she decided to do a video on how the electoral college really works. And she used her crafts in order to illustrate it. So it was kind of fun. And that video just caught on and went viral. And so she then started to create all sorts of, you know, in addition to providing information for people. She launched workshops. She launched seminars. She launched book groups. She launched a whole bunch of things where people could come together across ideological divides and talk about controversial issues. She had a workshop on abortion. Okay. And there's a wonderful article written by a wonderful journalist by the name of Elaine Godfrey. And she talks about how, you know, they're disagreeing about something, and I'm not

disagreeing. They're talking about, you know, let me just read this to you. It's really important. Hearing information that challenges our beliefs does not usually feel good. Yet participants, in McMahon's abortion workshop did not seem to want the lesson to end. They listened as she described early case law and the right to privacy. They peppered her with questions about personhood and viability. They divulged personal stories and shared their most closely held religious views. The Zoom chat filled up with reassurances whenever someone raised their hand. Thank you for bravely speaking up.

One woman asked McMahon whether lawmakers should be allowed to use their religion to justify banning abortion. Quote, that is the million-dollar question, Courtney McMahon replied. All of society's laws are based on a society's morals. Where do people's morals come from? I mean, what an amazing context. You know, the conversation, when you talked about her example, it did remind me of, I had a conversation, which you might want to listen to, a podcast conversation with Charles

Duhigg, who wrote a book about having how to basically how to have. conversations i would love i think i saw that i would and there are examples of exactly it's where groups get together yeah groups with on gun on guns yes and abortion with people of vastly different viewpoints and when they start to talk to each other yes the end of the period you find that there's a you know they may not have changed your views completely but they have an appreciation of the other's viewpoint in a way that's that's really important and unlocking minds but the but the the other but the crux there's a quote you have here which which which resonate with me is is this quote you say i honestly don't think people believe they can get the facts

yeah this is really the crux the matter they don't understand where to get the facts they don't know who to trust they don't they feel like they're getting played every day um and i think and as an educator and a scientist i mean i see two things here first of all that's why science is important because absolutely science is a process that teaches us to be skeptical, to test our ideas, to be willing to change them if the data doesn't fit the ideas, to constantly keep doing that. Absolutely. And at the same time, and this will come up later, it also reflects the problem of our educational

system, because in fact, we'll get to it when we talk about misinformation, we are training kids to grow up in an era of misinformation and to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff. And so we'll get that. But I do think that's the real key to this way of trying to break through to unlocking our minds is the way humanity has learned to unlock its mind, which is a scientific process. And it's kicking and screaming. It's not, I mean, scientists themselves are biased and want to believe things, but the process works. It also, requires a dialectic. It requires not just you, we'd be willing to expose yourself to facts, but other people confronting you and your ideas and having that and having that give and take.

So that scientific basis, I think, is a key part of what's necessary to unlock minds. Absolutely. And one of the reasons why I enjoyed working with Chris Ardress is one of the things that he was trying to help people develop. is the ability to apply that aspect of the scientific method in their everyday interactions. So you would say, if you had a point of view, so you say, you know, I think it's best if we do X, somebody would say, can you help me see? What data do you have to suggest that? And here's some data that suggests it might be a problem.

What's your reaction? And by the way, when you first start teaching this to people, they go, who the hell talks about like, who talks like that in everyday life, okay? And the answer is no one, but perhaps they should, okay? And so I've learned to sort of cosmetically change it to, you know, so, you know, if you had an experience or have you seen anything to suggest that I'm wrong or I'm missing something, even that is hard because we're all taught to be polite, okay? And so people don't want to say yes.

They'd say, well, I'm not sure if I, no, no, no. And so that's why you have to say, I'd find it helpful if you would tell me, okay? You've got to go, you've got to bend over backwards to get disconfirming, falsifying data from people. Yeah. Okay. And you've got to do it in plain English. You can't do it. You've got to bend over backwards to get it from other people.

And you've got to bend over backwards to get it from yourself. I mean, I mean, I think that's the, especially with echo chambers now. I mean, you can be reinforced to, it takes a conscious effort to go outside of your echo chamber. And as a physicist, Richard Feynman said, the easiest person to fool. Love Richard Simon. Yeah. Say that again, the easiest person to fool it yourself. Yeah, absolutely.

It really is. And you have to constantly remember that because we all fall into that natural tendency. And it's great if you can have other people and encourage other people. But you have to still also, I think, and we have to train students. This is why I think we, you know, it's not the facts. We have to teach them how useful the process. of the scientific process is and I don't I don't see it enough and how useful it is and for things that they care about if people tethered it to people's self-interest more I think we'd get further faster

that's probably true yeah so I mean if we said look you know if you don't see this it's it's you're only you're only stunting your own growth your your own learning and and potentially harming yourself or harming others so it's in your interest to try to understand what you're missing. Well, the next case that you present is, I think, particularly appropriate and particularly timely. And it relates to Lewiston, Maine.

Oh, yeah, that's a great story. Why don't you talk a little bit about this story? Because I think it's an important story, and it demonstrates the pluses and minuses. And, you know, to preface it, it's a story about immigration in Lewinson

and how it helped. And then, and then the back reaction that caused. So why don't you? Yeah. I mean, it's a bit of a two steps forward, one step back, two steps forward. Yeah. And they're doing well now. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. So and Lewiston was a city with severe problems and I've driven through it and. Oh, you know, okay. Yeah. So yeah, Lewiston, it was a classic mill town in New England that, you know, the industry under the pressure of competition, especially global competition, move south or moved overseas in order to get cheaper labor.

And so eventually the factory that was huge closed. And so the town was dying. And the town manager thought that the only way that the town could get revived is by an injection of people, which was very smart. I'm forgetting his name right now. But in any case, he understood that the dilemma that he was going to face is that Maine was the white estate in the country. I have a very bad joke, which is it's so white, even though snow is white. But it is the whitest state in the country.

Vermont is a close second. And the people who were immigrating to the United States were largely people of color. Okay. So he understood that that was going to be a tricky transition. But through the immigration network, informal network, Somali immigrants who had come from Somalia and had gone to the south and were not able to get the kind of jobs and education and conditions they wanted had heard that Lewiston was safe, had housing that was affordable, had an educational system that was better. And so they started migrating to Lewiston. And the initial influx of immigrants ended up actually increasing the town coffers because they were paying taxes. Businesses that

were shuttered were starting to open again. Rentals were starting to rent. And the town started to revive. And then at some point, the mayor, this is so like Springfield, Ohio, it's uncanny. Yeah, and that's why I wanted to bring it up because it's so, this was a town that was, you know, a small town, a white small town where a lot of, in this case, Somali citizens came in and I was struck because the quote, you know, that's written, you say here is the more Somalis arrived, the better the town's prospects became, which is not what you hear. No, but that was true coming out of. Yeah, but that's true. That's true in Springfield, by the way. Yeah. And the difference, I'll tell you, the big, I'll come back to the story, but I'm. want to say that the biggest difference between Springfield and Lewiston is that after those lies about Haitian immigrants eating cats and dogs, the law enforcement, the white law enforcement, the white mayor, the Republican governor all stood up for the immigrants and said that is not true. Okay? That did not happen in Maine. Yeah. In fact, in Maine, you know, after it began to get better, you point out that one of the people said, you know,

when they were talking about how good it was, a Somali business owner, he was, you know, doing great, said he was worried the politicians will try to separate us. And of course, just like they did in Africa. Just like they did in Africa. I mean, he had been there and done that. And but, you know, it was interesting because this is where our choices come in as a people. The mayor of Lewiston, whose name I'm going to forget, wrote a letter to the immigrant community saying,

could you slow down the rate of immigration of Somalis to the town because it's starting to tax our services and our budget? Okay. And that could have been and was, by the way, interpreted. Moray T. Raymond Jr. Yeah. I'm sorry, what was it? L'Oriy T. Raymond Jr.

Jr. Okay. And there were a lot of French Canadians had come down. to Maine. It's like they did Vermont, and he was one of them. And the guy who ran for, the guy who was governor was another. But in any case, yeah, yeah, he was a Trump lookalike who presaged Trump. But in any case, so the mayor was, what he did was interpreted in three different ways. One was, oh, he didn't mean anything by it. Another one was, what a racist son of a gun. And then the third one was what he did was very problematic but I don't think he understood that and

wasn't intended so those were three very different interpretations the interpretation that people reacted to in the moment was racist son of a bitch and they started to protest okay that then drew the attention of the New York Times because the press likes to lead with what leads yeah okay and so they said oh extremists I'm going to Maine okay okay I'm going to report on it. And then when the New York Times reported on it, that brought in the Ku Klux Klan. Okay. So notice that sequence.

The guy got interpreted in the worst possible light. They attacked him. That drew the attention of a leads with what bleeds press. That drew the attention of the Ku Klux Klan. And before you know it, it's confirming the worst fears of the white manors. Yeah. It's awesome. Okay.

But that's not where the story ended. Yes. Yeah. So what happened is an organization that, you know, the people's coalition, the main people's coalition, it was a multiracial coalition that organized to lobby for and advocate for policies that were conducive to the state working for all. Okay. Not just for some, but for all. And they managed to pass a whole bunch of stuff, including rank choice. voting, which made it harder for people like Lerpage to get elected, the governor, who got elected with only 30% of the vote. Okay. And when he got elected, it was a real step backwards, but since then he got voted out of office and more progress has been made. But that coalition was very important because what it allowed white manors and black manors to see is that they could work together. They shared the same interests. They had common problems. If they stuck

together, they would not allow themselves to be divided like they had gotten divided originally in Lewiston. The mails people's lines. Yeah, Maine's people lines. I hadn't heard of it, but it was very heartening to see exactly the kind of thing you're talking about, work in least Maine. It hadn't worked in the country. And we're seeing, as I say, we just seen it. When I read it, I remember, I mean, just, you know, spring, what's happening right now in Springfield is it just resonates with me. Here's a community where, you know, we now vilify immigration so much, but it actually helps the community. Can I just stop on that for just a second? Because we have a distribution problem in the country because the press leads with what bleeds,

as opposed to focusing on solutions. There's an organization called Solution Journalism Network, which is, trying to reinvent the news by focusing on how people are solving problems because we have a distribution issue, which is communities who solve a problem in one place, Lewiston and in Maine. Okay? What they have done, that information does not get to another place, Springfield, Ohio. Okay? So when you say it worked there, but it doesn't work here, it's because that's why I wrote the book. One of the reasons I wrote the book is so people will see, hey, no, there's a bunch of stuff you can do. In the book, I said, 10 to thousands of people. When I finished the book,

I realized it's hundreds of thousands. And about a month ago, I realized it's millions of people across the country are doing this. But we don't hear about it. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, we'll talk, we'll get to the press in a second. Because they are, indeed, you could say part of the problem right now. Yeah. And, and, but, so I want to move to the, to the next part of the book, and which is really thinking about remaking democracy. Yeah. And, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and what, and what's been happening. And, and, and, and then also presaging various problems. But I have to say, it begins with a quote that I'd never heard before that I love from Abraham Lincoln, which I want to say. Well, I mean, this is amazing how he said, I don't like that man. I must get to know him better. Isn't that wonderful? Isn't that a brilliant quote? I'd never heard that. And I love that quote. I, I have to, and when I read that, I thought, I'm going to try, I'm going to try and remember that because by, my tendency, I don't take that viewpoint as a rule. Absolutely, yeah.

And we should all put that on our, where we get our coffee in the morning. Yeah, exactly. I was thinking it's a great, it's a quote that we should put somewhere. It should be a meme that's up on the web and up on my refrigerator. Yeah.

I think, you know, you talk about cross-group friendships. And I think in the interest of time, I want to jump ahead to a cross-work group friendship that you talk about in the House of Representatives, which I found, frankly, remarkable in the sense of given the current, you think of the House of Representatives as one of the most polarized place in the world. And at least there was a, for a while, and I wanted to ask you to update this because, you

talk about this group as if they, as if it's a success, but it doesn't seem to me from the outside today as we as we approach another election to be yeah sure but you talk about this group in in in in what why don't you talk about what happened in with by kilmer and timmins and in in the representatives um well you know and and and i do want to say um um there's a there's a substack which is a news platform we're going to talk well this this actually you'll be pleased to know this podcast goes out on substack to okay as and in an ad reform. So we have it. We, the Origins Project has a substack site. So we're big okay. Well, well, I'm going to talk about Congress. I promise. There, and this is an intro to that.

There's a young journalist by the name of Gabe Fleischer, F-L-E-I-S-H-E-R. He has a substack news outlet. And he gives a less distorted view of Congress's functioning than the press. Okay. Okay. So we get, we get the most disgusting, dark, pathetic, ridiculously awful side of the Congress, which exists. And it's too much of Congress. It is in terrible shape. I don't want to suggest otherwise, but it's not the whole story. So go go look at it. And by the way, the Committee for the Modernization of Congress, which is what I talk about in that essay, had one article in all of its four-year tenure written about in the press. One. One. Okay. So

you want to hear the story? Let's tell people about it then. It's about Tom. Yeah. So the reason I know this story is my husband, Bruce Patton, who wrote a book called Getting V.S. and Studies Negotiation and Conflict. He founded an organization with a guy by the name of J.B. Lyons called Rebuild Congress initiative. And so he went, he was the one who trundled down and interviewed a bunch of representatives on how Congress is functioning. This is before the committee got launched and met somebody who said, boy, you know, I ran for Congress because I really wanted to make a difference. And ever since I've been here, all I feel, I feel like a potted plant, okay? Yeah. And that was the

first time I went, wow, those guys are feeling it too. Jeez, you know, that's kind of sad. I felt really, anyway. So. And by the way, that takes us back to the beginning of this podcast. This is the one where you read the quote of, this is a pot at plants. This is why I want to write the book. So that's what we're doing. We're all feeling like pot of plants. Anyway, so Bruce meets this fellow by the name of Derek Kilmer, who has been charged with heading a committee called the Modernization of Congress, which was a kind of politically acceptable way of talking about what are some reforms we can make to improve.

the functioning of Congress. And he had a, this was the two years before January 6th. It's a temporary committee. It's charged with two years. It gets renewed and goes for another two years. And now it's a permanent committee. Okay. But I'm focusing on the four years before, the two years before and the two years after January 6th. His first co-chair was representative graves from a southern state. I'm not going to remember the name of. His second one was Timmons and also from a southern state. Obviously, one's a Democrat, one's a Republican. They were in complete alliance that if they want to change how Congress functions, that they need to change how that committee itself functioned, that they needed to make a cultural change in their own way of operating. And so they did several things. The first

thing they did is before they even started convening business, they held a facilitated retreat. And my husband was one of the facilitators and they did things like trying to understand what's our definition of success how are we going to operate that kind of thing but the most important thing is they started building relationships across parties okay which congress does everything since since what's his face uh tea party 1980s uh uh uh a tea party 1980s uh the guy newt gangridge He understood that the only way he was going to dislodge the Democrats as if Congress didn't work. So he did everything he could to separate the parties from dealing with each other, including, you know, they're going to go home during recess. They're not going to be around.

Okay. So everything is like Democrats do things here. Republicans do things here. So they said, we're going to do things together. Okay. We're going to sit together. We're not going to sit across from each other. We're going to go Democrat, Republican, Democrat, Republican.

We're going to relax the constraints on time. We're going to break bread together. We're going to build relationship. It was a very conscious strategy, okay? And the committee before this committee that was charged with reforming Congress, which lasted for two years, produce zero proposals and reforms. The committee on the modernization of Congress produced 200. Now, they ran the gamut, and they have not addressed things that need to be addressed,

and they understand that, like money and politics. you know, a whole bunch of political reforms. But what they did do is a number of interventions that started to affect the culture of how they operated. The other thing they did is they demonstrated for every committee in Congress, whether those committees are paying attention or not, that they have complete control over how they structure their committee. There is nothing to prevent any other committee from doing what they did,

having a retreat to begin with, breaking bread together, sitting there. Amanda Ripley, who's a wonderful author, wrote a book, called High Conflict, highly recommended. She was a guest expert on conflict, invited to the committee. And she's the one who wrote the one article on the modernization of Congress. And she said it was unnerving to be questioned by this committee because I couldn't tell who was a Republican and who was a Democrat. Okay. And they got so much done. And one of the things that Kilmer did is he went to talk to a really, I don't know who it was, but a very

notable coach of an athletic team. And he said, I want to know how you, how do you get a team to work together? And he goes, I don't know anything about Congress. And he goes, forget Congress. Just how do you get a team to work together? And he said, and he said, especially when some members of the team are trying to, you know, undermine everything. And he goes, well, that's a problem.

And he goes, what do you do with new team members? You know, what happens? And he goes, well, we have a, like this big introduction for everybody who, comes. I forget what it's called for the freshman congressman. And he goes, so, you know, how does that get structured? And he goes, well, the Republicans go off in one bus and the Democrats and another and they wear this and they stay here. And the coach looks at him and he goes, you might want to change that. And so they did a recommendation that you bring people together, you do all this kind of stuff. And there were other recommendations too. So, you know, there's no question it didn't

go as far as it could. But one of the things that was so stunning to me is after January 6th, Kilmer said to himself, I don't know how we can possibly work together after that. That's why I was saying. I'd love to hear that. Sorry. Yeah. These guys were absolutely terrified. I mean, they were under assault. And by the way, every listener on this podcast ought to go to the New York Times video that was published in June 2021, but has been republished recently as Jack Smith has come back to the Supreme Court. You can see in the most recent Times article at the bottom, there's a video of January 6th, okay? And you can imagine what it would have been like to be a member of this committee when it's under the assault that you see in that video.

I mean, it was terrifying. And so Kilmer is saying, I don't know how we're going to work together after that. And so they decided to do something that, you know, you just can't believe a congressman. committee did. They got a facilitated retreat again. But this time they weren't talking about what's our mission. They were processing their feelings about January 6th across partisan lines. Can you imagine? Yeah. I mean, who would imagine this happening, right? Yeah. And we never hear about it. Yeah, that's shocking to me. Yeah. Shocking. I mean, it's shocking. And it's shocking because it disconfirms, falsifies your preconceived notion that Congress people are

are not capable of doing this. And that notion is killing us because they are capable of it. All right? No, I mean, I've testified before Congress on one occasion. On that occasion, I was shocked to see people of vastly different political persuasions when this was on the future of space exploration, me and Buzz Aldrin. And I was shocked to see how they could agree at times and work together. And I was really, it was for me an amazing thing.

thing. Yeah, and then that's because between you and me as citizens, we're citizens and we're standing over here, and we're going to, I know you're going to get to this later, and over here you have reality, okay, how Congress really works. And standing in between us is a corporate media, okay, that filters reality. It filters reality. Yeah, okay. Well, we have to talk about that. We'll get there. I'm conscious of your time because I have another 15 minutes or so, and I I want to, but there's a few examples that I want to get to before we get to that. And two of them in particular. One has to do with Pittsburgh, because I also think it's timely, given what's going on right now

in universities across the country. It's this friendship experience that you talk about putting faith in friendship. Oh, that's in Florida, the new college. No, no, no. I'm talking about the experience of what happened and the response to the killings. Oh, the tree of life. Okay. Yeah, yeah.

I mean, I think that's important because we're, you know, we're seeing that kind of how to respond to that kind of hate. This is a community that responded to it and we're just seeing, we're seeing that. Absolutely. That's probably throughout the country right now. Yeah. So if you could comment on it because I think it's timely. Sure. And I'll try to be a little less wordy than I have.

That's okay. Yeah, it's very hard. Let me give you a quote in this regard that maybe help direct it because I like it. it's a rabbi um uh one of the rabbis involved uh said it's not just about someone that who lives next to you a neighbor is someone who you actually have a moral responsibility towards and who has a moral responsibility towards you that's a wonderful it's a great quote and i think it exemplifies what what they tried to do there so why don't you talk about it yeah and not even tried to do it's what they actually did i mean is first of all you need to understand pittsburgh like the town i

come from Boston, has a history of hundreds of years of segregation. And in Pittsburgh, it's exacerbated by the fact that they have these rivers cutting across it. And so you have these separate communities. And in this instance, the tree of life, a synagogue was attacked and 11 of the congregants were murdered. And as often happens after these horrific events, as people come together and there's a vigil. But beyond that, in Pittsburgh, one of the leaders in a Muslim mosque came by and said, how can we help? What do we do?

Can we get you food? Can we create a line protecting your synagogue? What can we tell us what we can do? And the African American community showed up and the Asian community showed up. And then they began to realize that this was a product of people being so divisive. and that what they needed to do was to start building bridges across these different communities that had been so distant from one another. And so they started working together in schools and they started creating panels and the city sponsored research. And over three years, it wasn't just

three nights. Over three years, they started trying to fix this problem that was a product in the making over generations. And they made huge progress. And the fellow from the mosque said, said, guns are not going to make us safer. What's going to make us safer are our relationships with one another. And sadly, that began to break down after Gaza because the rabbi who was at the tree of life was very disappointed that more people hadn't reached out to him. And one of the things that went through my mind is, you know, the Muslim community might have been hurt that they hadn't reached out to them.

I mean, maybe they did, okay? But clearly, you know, they didn't reach out as much as they might have in the past. And there was a woman in San Francisco whose ice cream parlor after Gaza got attacked. And they wrote on, you know, Jews, you know, down with the Jews, you know, Palestine. And she responded by writing a public letter of love to the community. Yeah. And there is a, I don't know, and there is a group called resetting the table. It's later on in your book, but it reminded, you know, Pittsburgh, so they managed to successfully do that at least for a little while.

And then it's, I guess the question is, is can we learn from Pittsburgh to see, to try and to try and do something nationally? Because clearly, we have this national, unbelievable divide of emotion. and some of it's provoked, but, you know, regarding Israel, and I mean, my background's Jewish, and so, you know, it's, and I, as a devout atheist, I, I, I've never, you know, I, I say, yeah, my background's Jewish, but I'm not Jewish, but I've, I started to identify being, as being Jewish, only once anti-Semitism started to increase. And so I do, you know, ain't that instructive, right? Yeah. Also, you go after white guys for being sexist and all of a sudden they're in-cell rooms on the internet.

I mean, be careful what you do with that kind of stuff because it's dangerous. But I think the solution is what is already happening. And I've said it, I said it a bunch of times in the book, but I'm going to say it here. I think it's going to happen in locally rooted groups like Pittsburgh, locally rooted cities, communities. But they have to be nationally connected. okay it has to be both locally rooted working on common problems in the case of Pittsburgh is how do we create a safe community and they're still working on that that hasn't gone away okay it's it's always two steps forward one step back so we yes we can learn from

Pittsburgh and the more we not in our town by the way Patrice O'Neill who you know 20 years earlier was in Montana yeah he's the one who did repair repairing the world which is the film about Pittsburgh, okay? So, you know, she's, she's been in there for the duration, and she's trying to help people see. It's these locally rooted, nationally connected groups, like not in our town, who are going to mend our, also there's an organization called Weave. It's a national organization with local roots. Okay. And, okay, and then that's, so I wanted to indicate that there are efforts, and we need to look at them because we have severe problems nationally. But there are also personal things you can do. And I do want you to mention the story of what, of what, of what

Allison did with Barack Bell or Derek, whatever his last name was. Derek Black, Derek Black. The ultimate irony of a white mask. Yeah, of a white supremacists called Derek Black. Yeah. Because I think that's also very informative of what that experience, which again reminded me of my conversation with Du Higg about reaching across

to your ideological enemy. Well, first, because we won't be able to give the story what it deserves in the short time we have, Eli Saslow wrote a book called Rising Out of Hatred, and I strongly recommend everybody read it. It's like reading a novel. It's so fascinating. And it's remarkably instructive. So Derek Black gets a scholarship to New College in Florida. It's a very liberal, left-wing, progressive student body. Not everybody. There are a few people who are more center-right. among them is Matthew Stevenson, an orthodox Jew, who does not share the progressive

point of view. Certainly is not right winged by any stretch of the imagination. But he forms a friendship with Derek when he first comes to school. Matthew's roommate is Alison Gornick. A year after he comes to school, Derek now has made friends with people, but he's still a white nationalist. he and his father co-host a radio show sponsored by Stormfront, which is a hate site, white nationalist hate site. And he's the godson of David Duke, who was a Ku Klux Klan leader, okay? So this guy is, you know, the heir apparent of the white nationalist movement,

Derek Black is. And after about a year, after he's made friends and he's, you know, starting to wonder a little bit about his beliefs, but he's still holding tight to them, he gets outed and the left wing in the school wants him out and they want to expel him and Matthew Stevens said no I'll tell you what I'm going to do I'm going to invite him to Shabbat so he invites Derek to his home for Shabbat with a bunch of other students a bunch of students say I don't want to be there with a white nationalist I'm not going to go

one of those students who didn't want to go is Allison Gornick she just shut the door and and didn't have anything to do with them but a few months later she found finds herself on a boat with Derek and she meets them and she gets to know him just as a person. And she goes, my God, how can such a nice, gentle, curious soul possibly be a white nationalist? And she goes, I got to figure this out. And she goes, I'm like Sherlock Holmes. I got to get to the bottom of this. So Matthew Stevenson had a philosophy about what to do. And his was, don't bring up Derek's beliefs. He turns to his friends and he goes, just don't be assholes. Okay. We want the guy to come back, which was a good, it was a really good strategy.

yes okay on that foundation alison started to lean in with him and say can one point she goes can we talk about your beliefs he was very nervous about it but he said yes and they started talking and she goes well what data do you have for this again getting getting back to facts okay so the two of them begin to work together on their competing beliefs they get on the internet they look at articles they start putting the beliefs to scrutiny after and then they become very close friends they're married now oh they're married that isn't in the book or at least if it was no they weren't married then wow isn't that interesting okay um wow but you know they they went from friends to becoming sweethearts but over the course of it they were you know they were confronting each other very directly and at one point um when um Derek writes a note saying that his beliefs have evolved but he doesn't disavow white nationalism yet he's trashed again um on the slack site at the college and he's hurt by it. So he reaches out there, Allison and he are in different

parts of the world. He reaches out to Allison. He's sort of hurt and she goes, I don't know what to tell you. They don't know you the way I know you. All they know is your white persona. And frankly, you've caused a lot of harm to a lot of people who've done by the mind. What are they supposed to do? She did not hold back. Afterwards, when he reflected back on what led to the transformation of his beliefs, he said, it was a combination of two things. One is, these guys were friends regardless. And the other is they never protected me from the impact of my actions.

Okay. And the result is the day after Trump was elected, he wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times, which you can find. Yeah. He not only disavowed white nationalism, but he warned us of the danger that we are in because of the rise of white supremacy and white nationalism in our country. It's an extraordinary peace. Yeah, it's amazing. see how someone can evolve in their views. I just, I find it

things like that are heartwarming, and it illustrates the importance of reaching across the space, even if it's an individual space. We don't have much time. There are a number of topics I want to hit. We've already talked about the press, the problem of the press, and a little bit about subject, but I do want

to read a quote, which I just think illustrates the problem of the press, and it's from when Roger Ells was being interviewed by Judy Woodruff. And it's being interviewed by and he goes, let's face it. There are three things the media is interested in, pictures, mistakes, and attacks. That's the one sure way of getting coverage. It's my orchestra pit theory of politics. You have two guys on stage and one guy says, I have a solution to the

Middle East problem. And the other guy falls in the orchestra pit. Who do you think is going to be on the evening news? And she says, so you're saying the notion of the candidate saying, I want to run for president because I want to do something for the country. It's crazy. And he says, suicide. And you know, it resonates me. I mean, it does indicate the problem of the press. And we could talk about that all day. And I don't want to belabor that because I'd like to end with something else. But it does indicate to me. I've often thought about that, the press that Donald Trump gets from saying something ridiculous is that press jump on it. And instead of talking about policy, they talk about something that, you know, again, effectively he's

falling in the orchestra pit. And it's kind of an interesting, interesting being to reflect upon. You talk about misinformation, and we've talked about that too, so I think I won't go into that. One thing that I, that there are two, I think there are two last things that I'd like to try and do in the last few minutes, at least mention. I don't know how hard, how hard your cutoff time is in a few minutes. By 335, I should be losing. Okay, that'll be fine. One of the things that you talk about is sort of change the conscious mind versus the unconscious mind. You talk about work of two guys or two people at MIT. And say those building on Chris and Don's original insight, myself included,

discovered that it's possible to exploit that little bit of control to become aware of our culturally learned social habits and develop new ones. We can't do it alone, however. We need another's help to pierce the fire. of our daily habits, as Rob Smith puts it in primal fear. So the idea that we have, we can, we have these unconscious social habits, and we talk about them and they're different than what we say is different than what we do. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the key point you raise over and over again.

What we say is different than what we do. And it's possible overcome it personally with a little bit of control. So I want to, I want to just have you talk about that for maybe a minute or two in your own experience. Okay. we're not I mean we have the capacity if we see that what we're doing is getting in our way in the way of people we care about and things we care about we have the capacity to change that we need to see it first and we can only see it with the help of others okay and it's not just and

it's very important because the common knowledge is what we say what we do is different than what we say, we have a stock of knowledge underneath what we do. Okay, that's our cultural learning, okay? So it's not like it comes out of nowhere. We have what Chris would call, we don't just have an espouse theory. We have a theory in use. We need to understand that theory and use. And the only way to do that is the help of others.

And then saying to ourselves the following, for me to have done that, what must the knowledge or theory or belief or assumption have been in my head? Because that's what I need to change. It's not just the behavior. It's the program below the behavior that needs to change. Yeah. And as you say, that requires a kind of control. I love the quote of right afterwards.

You say, decades of research, my own and others show that by observing each other's actions, you can help one another see and change them. so we can make something good out of conflict. And there's a great quote from Yoga who said, you can observe a lot just by watching. Exactly. The next chapter is, I don't want to give it short shrift because it's really important.

It's a great example of canceling less. I mean, and it's a wonderful example with the case of Juno Diaz of how, of something so an exception to the rule, an administrator, the head of an organization, It decides instead of succumbing to the mob and the accusations to actually look at something.

And in the end, not just decide to do the right thing, but be willing to stand up for the fact that they get excoriated for doing the right thing. And it's a wonderful, if more, I view the huge problem being the lack of a spine of almost all senior officials at almost all organizations and universities would rather virtue signal and be out in front. then do the right thing. And this is a great example of how Juno Diaz did not get canceled because the head of an organization decided to actually look into the case. And I just want to read the, because we don't have time to talk about it, the four, the actually seven things that you say people should think about or actually based on her published account of her experience in the Chronicle of Higher Education. First, refuse to simplify, face complexity head on. So if you're if you're if you're in a situation where someone is is about to be

canceled, refuse to simplify, face complexity head on, explore what happened, casting a wide net. Look at it. And this is again science. Don't just look at the confirming look at that evidence against. Make sense of conflicting accounts. Help get on the dilemmas they raise. Explore options with others in light of different values and pressures. Make a decision, explain your reasoning, acknowledge other views, then wait for it and reflect on your mistakes, retain the right to learn. And I think it's a, it's a, it's a wonderfully. I wish we had time to go through it in detail. But I'm, I'm aware of your time. And I do want to call out one thing, people, and your listeners have to read. There's an article by Rachel Kleinfeld, who's one of the leading

pro-democracy experts in the nation and the world. And she published a piece in an outlet called Persuasion, which you may be aware of, called How to Fix D-E-I. And it is an absolutely courageous and brilliant piece that's consistent with this. Well, that's great, because I'm not, yeah, I'm, I'm, it's,

it would be great to be able to fix it. It's right now, broke in with huge problems. I want to end, though, with, with it takes passions, not numbers. And I want to, and it's this, it's this, again, a story of, of the, based on the Stockdale paradox,

the Vice Admiral James Stockdale was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for, for G, eight years. Yeah. And you say this, and you describe, well, first of all, you say when business author Jim Collins asked how Stockwell survived, Stockdale responded, I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which in retrospect, I would not trade. That faith, he said, was very different from that of the optimists

because having faith that will work out is not the same as being optimistic that it will, that all good things will happen. And he said, and so you say, that's a stockdale paradox, brutal. So what the optimist did is they said, I'll be out by December. I'll be out by Easter. Okay. Yeah, yeah, I should say that.

I'll be up by December. And when they weren't, they became incredibly hard. And I'm glad for you adding that. But you say the Stockdale paradox is brutal facts. We face two existential threats, tyranny and extinction. Both threats call upon us to radically restructure the space between us so we can cooperate across groups on overcoming them. And powerful forces inside and outside of us will thwart us at every turn,

seeking to divide us to dilute our power and preserve the status quo. and your argument is that some people who succeed have a force within side themselves that allow them to create a turning point out of adversity that's happened every now and then and I think the point of your book and the point of what we're our discussion is that we are in adversity in many ways

and we like to get out of it and the stories here hopefully will help guide individual citizens but I want to ask are you optimistic or pessimistic Oh, you see, that's good. I'm not optimistic like I don't have a date. Okay, this is a really important question. Every time I have a dialogue with people, I say on a skill of zero to five, how hopeful are you? Okay, five being very hopeful. And people you just come in at two or three, sometimes one. Then I ask them, on a scale of zero to five, how much control do you feel like you have over your future? One, two, or three. Then I ask them, how much news do you consume? Zero five, okay? And those people who consume the most news have the least. confidence the least control the least hope okay and so I I am worried in the short term I think we're in for some pain real pain gonna get worse before it

gets better okay I'm I'm hopeful in the longer term the only question in my mind is there isn't an endless time horizon when you have climate change mm-hmm and nuclear weapons by the way and well nuclear weapons actually worries me even less than climate change, okay? Because climate change is for a lot of people in abstraction. Yeah, I realize. I work, you know, yes, anyway. Yeah, even with what's happening now with hurricanes and fires. So, but, but I think, let me put it this way. I think we have the power. I think we have the potential. People are already doing it. The forces like the media that drive us crazy, only exert their power because we let them. There are other alternatives

out there that we can go to. So I'm right there with Stockdale. I'm not losing sight of the ultimate end. Okay, great. Your faith. And that's why he wrote the book. Remaking the space between us has been a pleasure to talk to you about ways we can cross that divide. And it's a challenge for every one of us individually and certainly socially. So I'm glad we could discuss this complex topic and sometimes hopeful topic, and I'm glad you still have faith. I have safe, Lawrence. I do. And particularly because people like you are in the world talking to people like me, you could have dismissed this as hokey and not even invited me on your show. But look, you didn't. You invited me. And that's amazing.

Well, I'm glad I did. I'm glad I did. I must admit my first gut response was the former, and I'm glad I did the latter. Okay, well, thank you for that. I appreciate you. And it's been a pleasure. And you take care. Thank you very much. Yeah. Thank you. Take care. Thank you. Take care. Hi, it's Lawrence again. As the Origins podcast continues to reach millions of people around the world, I just wanted to say thank you. It's because of your support, whether you listen or watch, that we're able to help enrich the perspective of listeners by providing access. to the people and ideas that are changing our understanding of ourselves and our world and driving the future of our society in the 21st century.

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