Episode 14: How can I change their mind?

Introduction- Host Mónica Guzmán introduces the episode’s theme: the challenge of changing minds in politics.

Mónica introduces guest David McRaney, a science journalist and host of the “You Are Not So Smart” podcast and the author of How Minds Change.

• Mónica: “What if the reason we’re not changing each other’s minds is because the only mind we can really change is our own?”

McRaney shares his journey from believing that changing minds was impossible to understanding that it is possible under the right conditions. 

McRaney discusses the rapid shift in public opinion on same-sex marriage in the U.S., which was the fastest change in public opinion ever recorded.

• McRaney: “I used to think that you couldn’t do this. Now I think that anybody’s mind can be changed.”

Mónica and McRaney explain two key concepts from David’s book: assimilation and accommodation. 

• McRaney: “In the presence of anything novel or ambiguous, we have an opportunity to either assimilate or accommodate. So like you can imagine, if you’re at Starbucks waiting on your coffee and a marching band of crickets comes across the counter and they’re like one has a top hat that’s doing this. Like you’re not going to immediately change your mind by accommodation. You’re not going to say, oh, well, I didn’t know that could happen. I didn’t know crickets could do that. You’re going to try to fit that into your existing model through assimilation.”
• McRaney: “Through the course of your life up to this point, especially as adults, you’ve built such complex models of reality that you can assimilate almost anything. You can fit things into your existing understanding. And it’s a good way to protect yourself.” 
• Mónica: “Our brains really would rather assimilate new information than accommodate it. That’s because it’s less work for them.”

McRaney shares the story of Charlie Veitch, a former 9/11 “Truther” who changed his mind after participating in a reality show that exposed him to experts and evidence that contradicted his beliefs.

• McRaney: “The fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death. We are far more concerned with seeming like a good person to the groups to which we feel like we owe allegiance, than we are our own physical well-being. This is such a strong motivation for all of our behavior that it overrides the need for accuracy. Belonging goals will always supersede all, not supersede. They will absolutely titanically rise above anything else.”
• McRaney: “Charlie had a foot in two different worlds. He had two identities, which meant he had a social safety net, which meant he could sacrifice one of his social selves.” 

Mónica and McRaney discuss practical ways to help others become more open-minded. This includes creating a non-judgmental space, avoiding shaming, and reminding people of their multiple identities to reduce the fear of social death.

• McRaney: “All the persuasion techniques that work make that move—they go from face to face to shoulder to shoulder.”
• McRaney: “All the people I spoke to in writing the book that were in a conspiracy community that found their way out like Charlie Beach did, the story was always the same. The off ramp was someone from outside was a non -judgmental listener who had cognitive empathy and regular all empathy and held a space for that person and offered them an opportunity to see how their values, their beliefs, their ideas could find a place also here as it is there and allow the dissonance to just happen naturally. That was always the case in all of them.” 

Thank you to media partners Deseret News and KUOW.

Supporting Partner: NumbersUSA

Mónica tells a story about a liberal journalist who reconsidered her decision not to interview conservative activists for a piece on race in schools.

• Mónica: “Hearing that story is when the journalist’s perspective shifted. She had never considered until that moment that someone who deeply values interracial relationships could have concerns about this kind of teaching.”

Mónica mentions Megan Phelps-Roper’s story of leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, referencing her insights on shame as a reflection of violating the norms of one’s community. 

• Mónica: “Shame is that feeling you get when you realize you violated the norms of your community…but if it’s from your enemy, you translate it as succeeding.”

McRaney introduces the concept of motivated reasoning, illustrating how our justifications for beliefs often change with our emotions.

• McRaney: “The facts, the evidence have not changed. The motivation to search for justifications has changed.”
• McRaney: “When you’re having one of these battles with someone, you can see why facts can be strange because that’s not what we’re actually trying to discuss. The thing I’m trying to move you around on or help you find, the thing I’m opening space for if you to discover is this: why are you motivated to do this? What is driving you? Where is this emotion coming from? What is the emotion? That’s the space we’re trying to get to. So why are stories storytelling so powerful in this regard? It’s powerful in both directions. When you share your story with someone or you evoke a story with someone else, what you gain access to, whether or not you realize you’re doing it, or they realize they’re doing it is, oh, that’s what’s motivating their behavior. That’s where these feelings are coming from.”

McRaney leads Mónica through an exercise to uncover the true motivations behind her opinions about two movies: “Dune 2” and “Citizen Kane.” 

McRaney emphasizes that genuine curiosity and care are essential for effective persuasion. Without sincerity, attempts to change minds can come across as manipulative and are likely to fail.

Mónica shares a story about a protestor who, through a conversation, realized she no longer believed in the message on her sign.

• Mónica: “The thing is, as your work has shown, right, you can’t be confronted with hostility or aggression and stick around. You can’t. Your sense of self is going to fly the other way, but if somebody is there receptive to you and just asking you questions, It’s not even, they’re not even giving you their opinion. They’re just giving you the gift of understanding your own. And then when you understand your own opinion, you could find out what you’re wrong about.”

McRaney and Mónica discuss how most changes in beliefs happen gradually over time through small shifts rather than sudden epiphanies. These small changes accumulate, leading to significant transformations in perspective.

• McRaney: “Very often what’s happening are little changes, which are changes that lead to grand changes later on. It just accumulates.”

Supporting Partner: Life After Hate

Head to braverangels.org to learn more about and support Braver Angels.

Mónica, a Blue, discusses the interview with her conservative co-host, Red, April Lawson, and what they think their sides are good at or not so good at when it comes to changing peoples’ minds, using personal examples.

Mónica shares a personal story of how she changed her mind after receiving a harsh review of her book. Initially defensive, she reflected deeply on the feedback, which criticized her use of offensive language, particularly in violation of the second commandment.

• Mónica: “It was a really, really humbling thing. So I thought about it again. And we did issue a reprint, and I did take out that word because she was right. But each time, each time when I first heard the criticism and then when I first heard the suggestion, I wanted to push back. But then I just reflected. And so it wasn’t her or her review that changed my mind. It was the thinking that I did, the reflecting that I did as a result of what she said, that changed my mind.”
• April: “I think that one of the big reasons to try to say things in a way that the other party can hear is that you may not persuade them then, but that will enter, that will marinate, right? And it’ll become part of your relationship and part of their world. And so, yeah, but maybe just that it takes longer than you might expect.”

April recounts how her views on national security and the role of the U.S. in global affairs changed dramatically after she started working in the defense and intelligence community. 

• April: “My high school friends completely freaked out when I told them I had become conservative but the really difficult conversations were with my family. That was the part where, like, it was painful for years. My friends were more just confused, but I was at the time, the people around me were different people. And so it was a lot easier to maintain my views then.”

Both Mónica and April reflect on the concept that “all persuasion is self-persuasion,” as highlighted by David McRaney. 

Mónica emphasizes that to influence someone, one must first accept where they are in their thinking.

• Mónica: “Persuasion has very little to do with mastery of the subject that you happen to be talking about. That’s the part that’s like you cannot shame people into changing their minds. And we keep trying, don’t we?”
• Mónica: “I do think you have to accept in the moment of interacting with this person, the fact that this person currently believes this idea. You have to accept that or else, how can you possibly do any of the things that could actually allow your way of seeing this issue to influence the other person.”

April reflects on how her faith helps her navigate difficult conversations, especially when dealing with beliefs and actions she considers evil, and asks Mónica how she manages it from a secular perspective.

• Mónica: “I believe that there is this extraordinary sort of communion, and I don’t mean that in the religious sense, that can exist between people who are really connected. I have, for a long time, sensed that extremely connected conversation with another person is one of the reasons I’m alive. Like, it makes me feel so alive. Me too. And I think I have been in many situations where it has made the other person feel very alive as well. That state of utter connection is impossible to reach without openness to everything about the other person. Like, you have to get there at some point. And by openness, I don’t mean agreement at all, but I do mean there’s a way in which somehow I feel like I can abide here. And it has to be reciprocal. To some degree, it has to be reciprocal. It’s a hearing and being heard. It’s a both and. So I feel like I have reached that place even with people who hold some ideas that I would never hold. And then what happens for me is I find people really fascinating. They’re really interesting.”

April poses a challenging question to Mónica about how to interact compassionately with someone whose beliefs and actions include elements of evil.

• Mónica: “I believe that if you dig down deep enough, you can get beneath what looks like evil in a human heart. I believe that. But it would have, but it has to be one-on-one is what I believe. It has to be in a contained place is what I believe. You have to reach that level of like reception, you know, like almost like a radio signal. Can you get this person clearly is what I believe? You know, once we are in the mode of war and of armies and of structures and of castles and of people being far away, then look, evil is what evil is. Because you can’t even reach there anymore. So to me, like, I feel like evil becomes what we think of it as when we get so far away from each other that there is no more reception. That’s where I think evil really lies is in the distance between us. That’s where it grows.”

• April: “I basically never cut people out of my life. Sometimes they have chosen to leave my life. But I believe in unconditional love in that way. And yes, there are limits to what I can tolerate just like any human being. But I believe in never saying never. Like, I don’t believe in permanent cutoff.”

Mónica summarizes the episode.

Featured Song: Standards of Thought by Akil Dasan

Episode Credits. 

Mónicá Guzman:

Changing Minds. 

(Music up and under)

It’s a goal for a lot of people in politics and what feels like an impossible one, except, of course, when it isn’t.

David McRaney:

The host would be like, so what do you think? And they’d be like, I believe it even more now, except this one guy who’s like, I think I’ve changed my mind. 

Mónica:

And then a conversation with my good friend, April, that goes some places that you, and I for that matter, probably never expected. 

April Lawson:

You don’t have to worry about social death with me, and I’m grateful that you’re saying things that feel risky. 

Mónica:

All that and more is just ahead.

(Music change)

Welcome to A Braver Way, a show about how you can disagree about politics without losing heart. I’m Mónica  Guzmán, your guide across the divide. And I’m here to help you hear and be heard by people who confound you. 

Across this country, we are proudly conservative, liberal, independent, or just ourselves. And we don’t want to be at war here. We want to be at home. So, strap in, because it’s time we learn how to turn up the heat, turn down the fear and get real about things that matter with more of our fellow Americans than we thought possible. 

Hey there, and welcome back to the podcast, to this election year, and to an episode that is going to pry way into the mighty and mysterious black box inside each of us: our minds.

If there’s one question that haunts everyone in the heat of a political argument. In that moment when you realize that all your logic and passion are hitting a brick wall with whoever you happen to be debating, it’s this. How can I change your mind? Our politics looks like it’s so much shouting and so little budging that I can’t blame anyone for thinking that our ability to persuade each other on big issues these days isn’t just weak but broken.

That so many minds are such well -guarded fortresses that nothing we say or do could possibly lead them to consider a different point of view.

(music under)

But as my guest today will try to persuade you, that idea is completely wrong, along with a lot of the assumptions a lot of us have about what it means to persuade each other in the first place. David McRaney is a science journalist who’s been obsessed for years with the ways we reason.

He is the host of the popular You Are Not So Smart podcast, and the author of How Minds Change, a best -selling book on the science and experience of transformation that, I will be honest, transformed me. What if the reason we’re not changing each other’s minds is because the only mind we can really change is our own?

And what if that reality is not a dead end in our political disagreements, but a whole new beginning? Here then is my conversation with David McRaney.

(Music fades under and out)

Mónica:

All right, David, you have been thinking about thinking for a long time. And one big reason that this book, how minds change even exists, is because you started to change your mind about how people change their minds. 

David:

Yeah.

Mónica:

Can you tell us about that? What set you on the path to this book?

David:

A couple different things all at once, which is often the best way that you start going, okay, maybe I don’t know how the world works like I thought I did, a couple of different communities of that early time of the early Internet, the early 2000s Internet skeptics groups and secular humanists. They all had a very similar take, which was you can’t reason a person out of a position they didn’t reason themselves into. And they just sort of had an attitude about things that was, “don’t even try,” basically. And a lot of the research that I was writing about would support that in some ways. And I was giving a lecture, and afterward, a young woman came up to me and said, my dad’s kind of fallen into this conspiracy theory thing. And she’s like, what do I do about that? How do I get him out of this conspiracy theory? And I gave her the worst advice ever. I regret this so much that I spent years writing a book about how wrong I was.

I was like, you can’t. You’re out of luck here. Like, you can’t reason a person out of a position. But I remember when I was saying it, it felt like I was locking my keys in my car. I was like, ah! I don’t think that’s good advice because I don’t think I actually know if that’s true. And I also don’t like this pessimism. I don’t like this feeling. 

Mónica:

It was a dissonance. 

David:

Yeah, for sure.

Mónica:

You felt a kind of dissonance already inside you. 

David:

And I looked at her face, too. I was like, this is not the way that this should go. So I was interested. I became open at the idea. And then at the very same time, I had the podcast going.

Mónica:

And to our listeners, this is the popular You Are Not So Smart podcast. Check it out. Continue. 

David:

Thank you. I had a political scientist tell me, we were talking about how quickly people had changed their minds about same -sex marriage in the United States.

And over the course of about a decade, people went from 60% opposed to about 60% in favor. And we’re talking millions and millions of people who in just 10 years went, okay, I flip completely. And this political scientist told me that was the fastest change in public opinion ever recorded. And we’ve only been recording it since the like 1910s, but fastest ever recorded.

And then I imagine like, well, what happened between those two moments in time? What happened in their brains? So, I set out to try to understand how do minds change at that level, like all the way down to neurons and then going back up to these big social movements.

In the course of working on that and writing that, I changed my mind. I used to think that you couldn’t do this. Now I think that anybody’s mind can be changed. And it’s a complete flip. 

Mónica:

You are, you have convinced yourself through the research that you’ve done. And I have to say, after reading the book, I’m, I’m pretty dang convinced, too, that there’s reason not to be so cynical about this after all. 

David:

I used to be cynical. I am not cynical about this anymore. I, I am activated. I have a fire in me about it. But I’m not cynical. 

(Music up and under)

Mónica:

Okay. I want to pause here for a second to spell out a couple concepts from David’s book that are key to understanding a lot of what we’re going to be talking about here.

They are the two things our brains can do when we encounter new information. They can assimilate or they can accommodate. When our brains assimilate, they fit the new information into patterns or categories that we already understand.

When they accommodate, they create new categories that we have to shape and learn. To give you a real -world example, let’s say you’re out for a walk with a little toddler who’s just getting to know the world.

She points to a dog passing by, and you tell her, that’s a dog. When you get to the next block on your walk, she sees something that looks really similar. It’s fuzzy, it’s walking on all fours, just like the last new thing she saw, but it’s smaller and a different color. There’s enough similarities that the toddler can guess correctly that this new creature is something she already knows about.

She points at it and says, “Dog.” That’s assimilation. The kiddo assimilated the new information into mental categories she already had. And it worked. But let’s say that on the next block, you see a horse. She can see that it’s fuzzy, this new thing, and it’s walking on all fours, just like the dog. So she points to the horse, and she says, “big dog.”

But nope. You tell her that one is a horse. So now the kiddo has to create a new category in her mind to make space for this new information. That is accommodation.

David:

In the presence of anything novel or ambiguous, we have an opportunity to either assimilate or accommodate. So, like you can imagine, if you’re at Starbucks waiting on your coffee and a marching band of crickets comes across the counter and they’re like one has a top hat that’s doing this, like you’re not going to immediately change your mind by accommodation. You’re not going to say, oh, well, I didn’t know that could happen. I didn’t know crickets could do that. You’re going to try to fit that into your existing model through assimilation.

You’re going to say, okay, either I’m on drugs or there’s a hologram or somebody’s playing a trick on me, or this is something being projected. Something that I already understand is taking place. And through the course of your life up to this point, especially as adults, you’ve built such complex models of reality that you can assimilate almost anything. You can fit things into your existing understanding. And it’s a good way to protect yourself. 

Mónica:

Okay. Fun confession, I lately have been getting more into horror movies. And every horror movie seems to have this process where the characters go from trying to assimilate; “that’s just a mouse. That’s just the house creaking.” And then their beliefs that say, that’s just a mouse, that’s just a house creaking, there’s no one behind that dark door. 

Quickly, you know, turn on their heads when more and more, whatever it is, like the bodies pile up or what have you. But eventually, every protagonist in a horror movie has to change their model of what’s going on with the paranormal stuff that’s extremely challenging. And all the viewers sort of relate to that. Like, I always ask myself, at what point would I have changed my model of how the world works to say, “oh, yeah, I guess the demons do exist.”? You know, oh, yeah, I guess so. 

David:

The horror movie example is a great way to look at it because we’re always doing that. We’re always like, is that something I already understand, or I’m going to have to update my priors here?

Mónica:

So, you might be wondering, how all this relates to politics? As horror movies so dramatically show us, our brains really would rather assimilate new information than accommodate it. That’s because it’s less work for them. And our brains are lazy. So, if you’re trying to convince your daughter or uncle to rethink the categories or frameworks through which they see the world. Or, as David puts it, to ”update their priors,”  you’ll run into nothing more natural or more frustrating than the human brain’s built-in stubbornness. 

So often, and particularly in political issues wherever you are on the spectrum, when we try  to change people’s minds, it seems to go nowhere, or push them further from reach…

You tell this incredible story about a man named Charlie Veitch.

And he’s a man who changed his mind in a really remarkable way about what happened in America on September 11, 2001. 

David:

The, Charlie Veitch, when I met him, he was fresh out of a major life change. He had been a “Truther” with a big T. They were a community. It was a social identity where they had a very specific conspiratorial belief that 9 -11 was an inside job, that the government did this. They didn’t think it was an actual true terrorist attack. He had fallen into that community, a young man who was fresh out of a philosophy [degree], working in banking, and just felt like he was a cog in the machine. He didn’t, he was like, “I have this meaningless existence” and fell into this truther community. And he was great at it. He was very charismatic. He was a good -looking guy. He loved being in the public eye and he quickly rose through the ranks and became one of the most prominent truthers and he started making his own videos and he got a big audience. It’s a story we all understand now, but back then he was one of the first people to get pulled into YouTube fame.

So he got invited to go to one of the first reality shows. It was called “Conspiracy Road Trip.” It didn’t air in the United States. It was a British program. And they would take people from different conspiratorial communities. And then they would take them on a road trip to do the very thing we all think would be the thing that would work.

If we could do this, especially if we have a family member who’s fallen into one of these things, we’re like, if I could only do this. And what they would do is they’d put them on airplanes and put them in buses and take them to the actual experts or the actual people who experienced the thing that they had a conspiracy theory around.

And in his show, they took them to Ground Zero. They took them to the architects of the actual World Trade Center. They took them to experts on explosions, experts on manufacturing and engineering.

They had them learn how to fly an airplane and fly around New York in it. And they also had them get into a commercial flight simulator. And everything you could imagine you’d want a person to do to show them here is exactly all the things that you believe, here is the counter evidence. Here are the facts that do not comport with what you assume is true. And he was slowly feeling, like he had questions about “why did the steel beams, why didn’t that, you know, that can’t melt at this temperature.” But there was a PhD level engineer who was like, well, here’s how that works. It didn’t have to do it that way. It’s, there’s a whole building’s worth of weight above this metal girder, it just has to slightly bend and all that weight will do the rest of the work. And he was like, oh, I didn’t know that. And he was open to it in a way that was slightly more open maybe than the people around him. And…

Mónica:

Well, yeah, let’s get to that point because we haven’t clued listeners in on this show had several episodes, but didn’t change anyone’s mind on anything. Except…

David:

Except this one. He is the, like, 

Mónica:

except for Charlie.

David:

Like every episode… They had the London bombing, there’s several different conspiracy groups. At the end of every episode, the host would be like, so what do you think? And they’d be like, “I believe it even more now.” And it was except this one episode, this one guy who’s like, I think I’ve changed my mind.

So he goes in Times Square and he makes a YouTube video. And he’s like, I was letting you know if we’re about truth. I’m saying, I have changed my mind. And he puts that out and it just obliterates them, right? The truth or community went for him with a vengeance to the point that when I met him, he was in hiding. And all of this just for saying, I think I’m wrong. I am, no longer believe that this was an inside job.

So, he faced the fate that is actually at the center of all of this. And the way I get a sense you’re ready for the part where what makes Charlie different, right? 

Mónica:

Right, I think, I mean, everybody wants to know. All we hear is that just sharing facts doesn’t work, and it often doesn’t. But for him, it did, but only because certain other conditions were met. 

And I want to bring up the formula that you sum up in the book is, and this is never going to leave my mind. Social death is more threatening than physical death. 

David:

Okay. I’ll mention that right now.

Mónica:

What?

David:

I’ll mention that now so we could, like hammer Charlie’s story into a lesson for all of us is Brooke Harrington, the sociologist, she goes, if there was an E equals MC square of all the social sciences, it would be SD is greater than PD. The fear of social death is greater than the fear of physical death.

We are far more concerned with seeming like a good person to the groups to which we feel like we owe allegiance, than we are our own physical well -being.

This is such a strong motivation for all of our behavior that it overrides the need for accuracy. Belonging goals will always supersede all, not supersede, they will absolutely titanically rise above anything else. So, this is something I will urge everyone to notice because I’ll talk about how Charlie is an example of this. Oftentimes when having an argument with someone or a disagreement with someone or there’s a friction point in which you really cannot seem to get them to see things your way and you keep trying to throw facts to them, you’re asking them to see those facts through the same filters that you see those facts. You’re asking them to process that information the way you process that information. And what is often missing from that because it’s really top of mind, it’s rarely even known to you is that you’re one of your filters and one of your processes is: Will this make me look like a good member to my group if I believe this? Will this make me look like a good member to my group if I am skeptical about this?

And they have a different motivation in play because they have a different group to which they find allegiance. And this is how Charlie was able to approach this information differently than the people around him. Because what’s missing from the story that I was telling is that at the same time he was in the truther community, he had found his way into another community just called “Truth Juice.” 

Mónica:

Which is just the funniest name, by the way. 

David:

I love “Truth Juice”. This was a community in the UK that they would have like raves and like concerts and like festivals doing a lot of psychedelics and just trying to figure out the truth itself about existence and reality. And he really dug that in just like he had with the truthers, he’d become a sort of prominent figure in that community as well. So, Charlie had a foot in two different worlds. He had two identities, which meant he had a social safety net, which meant he could sacrifice one of his social selves. And he still had another one to depend upon. So, for him, social death wasn’t complete social death. He had no idea that was true. It just was true whether or not he realized it. And it gave him an opportunity to go, oh, well, that is how steel beams work. that. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know that. Wow. And he was updating his priors because he had the freedom to update his priors.

Mónica:

Right. He had he felt a sense of psychological, you know, safety. He wasn’t going to lose too much. And it suggests to me, I mean, a really powerful takeaway from your work for me is that one of the most impactful ways that we can try to change each other’s minds is to make sure that we offer a home for an alternative.

But what we often do, gosh, I hear about this all the time, where people take something away. They take a relationship away because of what someone believes. But it seems like the more that we go apart from each other, the more susceptible we might be to having our entire social identity on one or another group that does affirm us, that does hear our concerns.

And so then, it becomes so important. It’s the one big thing. And then no one can change their mind when maybe they should. 

David:

Yeah. You’re absolutely correct. And knowing this offers us several different tools. And there’s plenty of psychological research that shows how these tools can be played. You can do the thing where you make sure you signal the other person that they are not in a situation where they’re about to be shamed or ostracized.

So one of the big pieces of advice I often give is remember that if you say anything that can be interpreted as you should be ashamed for what you think, feel or believe or intend to do, even if they ought to be ashamed. If you signal to them that they ought to be ashamed, they’re going to react, they’re going to push away, and you’ve lost any chance to have the further conversation you need to have. The other thing is you can…so that’s like a don’t do. 

You can also add to, because a lot of the research suggests that when you remind a person that they contain multitudes, you remind them that they aren’t just one identity. There are several affinity groups to which they can find homes within and that this belief set has friction between those affinity groups.

That often will encourage a person go, “hmm, I should really think about that.” If you can identify it to the person that you and I share similar values, you and I both agree that this particular thing is a problem, or this is a goal that both of us would like to achieve. Now, you’ve entered into this nice little, we’re in a little group together. We’ve already started to establish a sharedness here that we can attack this.

So instead of going face to face, we’re switching to shoulder to shoulder. And all the persuasion techniques that work make that move. They go from face to face to shoulder to shoulder. 

Mónica:

That’s amazing. It’s one of those tips that I really wish we could all remember all the time because it does seem to make a giant difference for being such a simple thing. 

David:

All the people I spoke to in writing the book that were in a conspiracy community that found their way out like Charlie Veitch did, the story was always the same. The off ramp was someone from outside was a non -judgmental listener who had cognitive empathy and regular all empathy and held a space for that person and offered them an opportunity to see how their values, their beliefs, their ideas could find a place also here as it is there and allow the dissonance to just happen naturally. That was always the case in all of them. 

Mónica:

Yeah, the line I love from your book is that all persuasion is self-persuasion.

I think that’s absolutely transformative because we do even put it in our language. I’m going to change your mind. But in a way that’s misleading. I can’t change your mind. Only you can change your mind. So then I have to ask different questions about how I can potentially play a role in influencing something that’s going on in your mind.

(music under:

And so I want to share something that I observed. I watched someone change their mind. 

(Music out)

Mónica:

This season, we are proud to be partnering with two fantastic media organizations to help us reach more listeners like you. KUOW is Seattle’s NPR affiliate station, founded with the idea that everyone should have free access to honest, fact -checked information. Deseret News is a multi -platform newspaper based in Salt Lake City, committed to providing thoughtful reporting and insightful commentary from the Intermountain West.

Help us by helping them. Learn how at KUOW.org/brave or Deseret.com/subscribe. Thank you, Deseret News and KUOW for helping us create bridges between communities and A Braver Way listeners everywhere.

(music change. Up and under)

Mónica:

Before we move on, I want to take a moment to tell you about one of our Supporting Partners.  NumbersUSA is an organization of 8 million citizen activists who believe that better immigration is needed and possible. They advocate for an overall reduction in immigration, but they know that any policy change for the better in this country will only happen when Republicans and Democrats, liberals, conservatives, and moderates can sit down together, engage in civil discourse, and agree on problems and solutions. To learn more about NumbersUSA, a charter member of Braver Network, visit Numbersusa.com.

Learn more about Braver Network and the movement for civic renewal at braverangels.org/abraverway. 

(music out)

Mónica:

To get us back into the interview, I want to tell you the story that I teased before the break. It’s about someone who changed their mind on a delicate thing because of a conversation that they had had that very same day. This happened to a fellow journalist who happens to lean liberal in her politics.

She was working on a piece about race in schools, and she made a decision not to interview a set of conservative activists involved in the story because she was afraid that they were bad actors spreading a harmful idea that she didn’t want to spread any further.

After her piece was published, she got some critique on it from another writer who told her that a key perspective was missing from her story and that it probably was not as harmful as the journalist believed.

Now, race in schools is no easy topic. And that’s where the mind -changing comes in. To illustrate her point of view, the fellow writer who critiqued the piece told the journalist about her young son who’s white, and his close friend, who’s black. She’d been watching their friendship blossom as a parent, she said. And when she learned about some of the ways that race was being taught in their school, she wasn’t all opposed, but one thing did worry her. What if what her son and his friend learned about one of them being an oppressor and the other being oppressed could damage their friendship in ways that they might not have the tools to address?

Hearing that story is when the journalist’s perspective shifted. She had never considered until that moment, she said later, that someone who deeply values interracial relationships could have concerns about this kind of teaching.

And she agreed that her decision not to talk to the conservative activists might have been wrong. So David, tell me what you see in that story.

David:

It’s all of there, right? Some of the things that we’ve already spoke about were in there, which was this affinity group thing and group out group. And this is saying, like, do you know how to be, you know how you can be a good writer? Do you know how you become a good journalist? Do you know how you can become a real, actual manifestation of the identity that comports with your values? It’s by checking out what’s motivating that person. So this is very powerful.

Mónica:

I think it was Megan Phelps Roper, who we don’t have time to get into her story here, but boy, you know, she changed her mind in a pretty amazing way. Let’s go look up some details. But she has said, 

David:

Westboro

Mónica:

Westboro Baptist Church. She has said that she found this definition of shame that she thought was spot on, that shame is that feeling you get when you realize you violated the norms of your community. But she says, and she has personal on this. It, what matters is that it’s your community. If you’re getting shame from your other, your enemy, then you can translate it as, you’re succeeding. you’re getting them angry, which means maybe they’ll change someday. Which means maybe they’ll get it and I’m doing the right thing. So it’s this, it’s this whole thing. But I want to, I want to bring us back to one of the elements that you laid out so much evidence for why the following is really important, which is sharing stories from our experience. And in this case, the woman fellow writer who talked to the writer who did the story was saying, let me tell you about my son and his best friend.

And it was that story apparently that most stayed in the mind of the writer who eventually kind of came to see that, oh, maybe, maybe I missed something. So can you tell us, if we feel this dissonance with what someone else believes, and we really want them to understand where we’re coming from, and we want to influence that for them, putting it in the form of a story, instead of just, here’s my reasons, blah, blah, blah. That just doesn’t seem to be as effective as, let me tell you about my son. Why? 

David:

One of the things we’ve learned from the last 100 years of psychology is oftentimes the reason that you generate is just a justification or a rationalization. It’s not the real reason. When you’re in a conversation with another person and you’re talking about things, you ask like, well, why do you think that? It’s very likely the first thing that comes their mind ain’t the actual real reason.

Mónica:

The phenomenon David is describing here is called motivated reasoning. 

David:

The best way to describe motivated reasoning is I love this example if you ever had a friend or a loved one could be you and they’ve recently entered into a new relationship and you ask them what reasons do you have to like that person they will say things like what would I even start I like the way they talk I like the way they walk oh my god the way they did the way they glide across a room I love it I like the music they’re introducing me to like I of who we’re like hanging out and I’m like, oh, I never heard that. And you’re like, hmm, it’s great. Yeah, I’m so happy for you.

And then a few months go by and they’re, hey, we broke up. And you’re like, oh, wow, what reasons did you have to break up with this person? And they’ll say, where do I even start? The way they talk, like, it’s like hammering nails into my spinal column.

The way they, I don’t even like the way they walk. It’s so janky and weird. They look like a horror movie. The music they made me listen to. We go on a road trip and I’m like, oh, this again. So, as you can see, the facts, the evidence have not changed. The motivation to search for justifications has changed. My emotions have changed. And so now the same things that were justifications for have become justifications against.

So, when you’re having one of these battles with someone, you can see why facts can be strange because that’s not what we’re actually trying to discuss. The thing I’m trying to move you around on or help you find, the thing I’m opening space for if you to discover is this, why are you motivated to do this? What is driving you? Where is this emotion coming from? What is the emotion? That’s the space we’re trying to get to. So why are stories, storytelling so powerful in this regard? It’s powerful in both directions.

When you share your story with someone or you evoke a story with someone else, what you gain access to, whether or not you realize you’re doing it or they realize they’re doing it is, oh, that’s what’s motivating their behavior.

That’s where these feelings are coming from.

Mónica:

Or that’s what’s motivating my behavior. I’ve caught myself sharing a story because it just came up in conversation about this tough thing. And I go, later I go, oh my gosh, I didn’t realize. That just taught me what motivates me.

David:

Absolutely. And just like with a movie or a book, you gain this empathy for if I had experienced those things and the way that that person had experienced those things and I’d come from the world that they had come from, I can see how that could be a thing that a person would do. I see you as a real human being and you’re not some abstraction to me. We’re rotating now to shoulder to shoulder.

The mystery here then is why do we disagree about this? And that starts getting solved in that space starting to understand what motivates you’re we can do a really micro version of that if you’d like it always works 

Mónica:

Sure

David:

okay it’ll be very fast i’ll make this a very quick version of it um what is the last movie you remember watching like like what comes to my very quickly 

Mónica:

Dune 2 

David:

Okay very simple question did you like it 

Mónica:

Yes

David:

You liked it okay great let’s say you were you worked at Netflix and you write the little short paragraph for other people who might watch it Like, what would you put in that little short paragraph? What? 

Mónica:

Oh, boy. Dune 2, it is an epic, um, fantasy about, um, about the power of hope with lots of thrills and drama, extraordinary performances, uh, and a killer story. 

David:

Okay, thrills, hope, story of course, this killer story, got epic, okay. Where would you put it 1 to 10? 

Mónica:

Eight. Eight. Eight.

David:

Okay. So you’ve given this, you said you liked it. You gave a, you told me all sorts of great things about it, but it didn’t get to nine. Can you think of something that got to a nine for you? 

Mónica:

Citizen Kane is one of my all -time favorites, probably a ten.

David:

So here’s a great, here’s a great moment. If you made the Netflix description of Citizen Kane, what goes in there? 

Mónica:

Oh, my God. Oh, wow.

David:

Well, let me, Let me ask it this way. Is it epic? 

Mónica:

Yeah, because it’s over a person’s entire lifetime. 

David:

Does it have hope in it? 

Mónica:

It does. 

David:

Does it have great performances in it? 

Mónica:

Oh, yeah.

David:

So I haven’t seen where this is different from Dune yet. What is it…

Mónica:

So true. Okay, well, Citizen Kane was from 1941 and has been named, you know, one of the best movies ever by the American Film Institute and many other places. I also wrote a second place in my whole school speech about Citizen Kane and the connection to William Randolph Hearst, the journalism tycoon that meant a whole lot to me because, boy, I was kind of shy back then. But when I got second place in my entire senior class, or junior class, I think it was, for that speech, and I had done so much research and got so obsessed with Citizen Kane and Orson Wells, that movie is very meaningful to me.

David:

Okay. Now, we can stop here, but the conversation like this could go on for about 30 minutes, right? And we could have done something else. We could have been talking about gun control. And I could have said, are you for it or against it? Boom, answer immediately. You did not tell me about these true motivations, these things that were deeply personal and unique to Mónica , right? You did not tell me those things when we were first discussing that movie. 

Mónica:

That’s right.

David:

…But they did come out in the conversation, and you told it to me in story form.

Mónica:

Yeah, I did. And all you did, I mean, let’s really spell this out. All you did, you withheld any judgment in favor of questions that helped me reflect.

David:

And I truly honestly wanted to know. Like, here’s an important thing. None of this works if you don’t actually care. 

Mónica:

You can’t fake it, right? Right. I believe that too. It does seem like we’re extraordinary, extraordinarily sophisticated machines of detecting ulterior motives. 

David:

Yes.

Mónica:

Right? Maybe the message that there is you can trust yourself?

David:

If you do the work. Yeah.

Mónica:

Because that’s the other thing is like hidden underneath this entire conversation about how to change other people’s minds is how we allow ourselves to be persuaded when we ought to be. 

David:

Mm -hmm. 

Mónica:

…Because none of us, none of us wants to be the villain in our own story. None of us wants to be wrong for very long. You know? 

David:

No, of course not.

Mónica:

We want to know. But until you know you’re wrong, it feels like being right, right? 

David:

Again, my friend, [will story] gave me a tool for this. I love this. This is something you can ask yourself daily. This is so bonkers to me. I can’t believe we didn’t open with this, which is ask yourself, it could be about something specific. It could be one specific topic or wedge issue, but it could also just be everything, which is ask yourself, “are you right about everything?”

And if the answer is no, then ask yourself the second question. What are you wrong about? And that should make you feel weird. Like, oh, I don’t know. So I must be wrong about some things, maybe a lot of things, but I don’t know what I’m wrong about. So now we can move into third, fourth, and fifth questions, how important is that to you? How much does that matter to you? And if you know you’re wrong about things and it does matter to you, how would you go about discovering your wrongness? And that’s where the self-persuasion things, that’s where you need these tools, because anything that we’ve discussed can be applied the other, just towards yourself. You can be applied inwardly. 

Mónica:

Yes. Yes. There’s a story that’s been floating around Washington State that someone very dear to me passed on a couple years ago. And it’s a story from a war protest, not even sure which war it was. But here’s the, you know, people protesting the war and then the counter protesters, right? And they’re kind of on opposite ends of a field. And somebody from one side went to the other because he saw the woman’s signs and what they said.

And so he got curious and he sat down and he started asking her questions about the sign and about her and about all of that. And a couple hours later, that woman just kind of smiled, got up, thanked the man, and left because she realized she didn’t even believe what was on that sign. And that story has stayed with me because the phrase that I have for that is being confronted with your own opinion.

How rare of an experience that is and what a potential gift. The thing is, as your work has shown, right, you can’t be confronted with hostility or aggression and stick around. You can’t. Your sense of self is going to fly the other way, but if somebody is there receptive to you and just asking you questions, It’s not even, they’re not even giving you their opinion.

They’re just giving you the gift of understanding your own. And then when you understand your own opinion, you could find out what you’re wrong about. 

David:

Yeah, the dissonance almost always emerges. Like the process that we’re describing is I can’t do that process for you. I cannot copy and paste anything into you. But what I can do is create a space in which that process will occur and then help you, like, navigate it and be the sounding board for you. And change happens there.

It reminds me of “change my view” the subreddit that eventually broke out. Lots of scientists study it because they have such a high success rate. For anyone who’s never heard of this, it’s a it’s a subreddit. It’s a comment thread thing on the internet where someone presents an idea and says,“I might be wrong about this. Because everyone who comments after me, try to change my mind about it basically.”

Well, but the first thing you have to do is you must, because the rules of the comment board, is that you have to very carefully and completely articulate what is your current opinion. And they have found that a lot of the time, much of the time, that’s when the person just, they just, they write it all out and they’re like, oh, wait a second, I actually don’t feel what I thought I felt like, like that articulate, because you’ve never articulated it in that way. And you know, you’ve probably experienced this. If you’ve ever like typed anything into social media or started up a comment and then you’re like, nah, I’m never done it away.

That’s a very becoming an adult experience for you to throw away a comment because as you write it out, you realize a way to actually don’t think that is a great moment.

Mónica:

You’re so right. And you know, I think one of the reasons that we think changing our minds is so hard is because we don’t acknowledge all the little moments that it happens every day.

David:

Ask yourself, would you give your, let me just go back 10 years maybe, like would you give this yourself of 10 years ago absolute control over your life right now like they anything they say you have to do…

Mónica:

Whooooah. What an amazing thought okay you just blew my mind that’s a really good one which means that we’ve been evolving all this time! 

David:

Yeah! That suggests you may have changed 

Mónica:

Yeah maybe you’ve changed your mind already…

David:

There weren’t there weren’t probably a lot of 180s during that where you suddenly had a grand epiphany. Those do happen, and they sometimes happen in conversation. They sometimes happen in a persuasion. But very often what’s happening are little changes, which are changes that lead to grand changes later on. It just accumulates. 

Monica:

All right. Well, thank you so much, David. This has been absolutely amazing. It’s given me a lot to think about. Highly recommend all your work.

(music under)

And let’s keep asking these questions, you know, of each other and of whatever we trust to give us the truth 

(music change and under)

Before we move on I want to take a moment to tell you about one of our Supporting Partners. Life After Hate is a leader in violence intervention helping people disengage from violent extremist groups online and off to help establish a safer and more resilient nation.

To learn more about Life After Hate, a member of Braver Network, visit lifeafterhate.org. Learn more about Braver Network and the Movement for Civic Renewal at braverangels.org/abraverway.

(music under)

Mónica:

Braver Angels is leading the nation’s largest cross -partisan volunteer -led movement to bridge the political divide. Through community gatherings, real debates, and grassroots leaders working together, we’re offering America what it needs to overcome the bitterness of our politics. And here’s the thing. You can join us and be part of the solution. Head to braverangels.org/join to become a member and support our growing movement.

All this talk with David McRaney about changing minds, about persuading and being persuaded. It made me really curious about how this happens in everyday life.

So if you’re a long -time listener of this podcast, you know that this is about the time that I invite April Lawson, my friend and political red to my blue, to compare notes on how we think the strategies we just heard tend to map onto the left and to the right and to ourselves.

But this time we added a twist. We decided we would show up ready to talk about a time that we’ve changed our minds and see where that takes us. 

Hi, April, my friend, how are you?

April:

Hello. I’m good. How are you?

Mónica:

I’m good. My mind is spinning and swimming and wondering about its own existential realities and whether it changes and how it changes  and whether it changes other minds! 

Yeah,

Let’s dig in. 

April:

Great.

Mónica:

So one of the things that we reflected on before we got together was how our own minds have changed, So I will start by. Sharing a time that I changed my mind that was a little bit brutal. It was a few days after my book came out two years ago.And it’s that time when reviews coming in, what do people think of the book.

April:

Oh.

Mónica:

What do people think of the book? 

April:

Yeah. Oh!

Mónica:

Someone left a one-star review, The one star review went like this. offensive language. I would think that someone who claims to teach others how to talk in an inoffensive manner would first of all clean up her potty mouth. In particular,

April:

Oh my gosh!

Mónica:

…gratuitous violation of the second commandment is hurtful. Why not show some respect for the reader’s feelings? This is especially bad because this book was promoted as teaching people how to not behave like this. So, I wrote a book about curiosity across the divides, and I  saw this one star review, And I ended up agreeing with it, but I had to change my mind. I had to change my mind to get there. 

There is a sentence where it says something to the effect of, I realized what for years I’d been too petrified to notice. That everybody’s so g-o-d-d-a-m-n interesting.

April:

Ah.

Mónica:

So

April:

I see.

Mónica:

When I got this review, I immediately disagreed with it. I immediately disagreed with the idea that this was gratuitously offensive language and that it got in the way of people receiving what I wanted to say. 

But I started thinking. And my mind started going through some cycles. And I remembered that as I was drafting the whole book, I really wanted to speak as myself. I wanted  to write to the reader so that the reader really felt like I was just having a conversation with them. And the way I tend to speak includes occasional foul language. April knows this, when the  mics are off, there’s more of it. And so, when I thought to myself how much I wanted to emphasize that point, that I find people so interesting, the language I wanted to use was that 

g-o-d-d-a-m-n, interesting, because that’s how I emphasize it, but! 

But I thought, there were parts of the editing where I pulled out some language I used that I knew was going too far. And I didn’t pull out this one, because I thought, no, this is where my voice versus a voice that everyone can hear and doesn’t feel too offensive no. It’s still, it’s my voice. That’s fine, no  one should mind, 

But she minded,

April:

Yeah.

Mónica:

And other people minded. In fact, 15 people found that one star review helpful on Amazon.

April:

Oh…my gosh

So, she’s right. She’s right. But it started with wanting to be defensive.

No, I wanted to assimilate. So we’re talking  about some of the strategies we heard in the interview. I wanted to assimilate this criticism into my current model of what constitutes language that I would and would not use. And what constitutes language that other people ought to be able to hear me in.

And so I wanted to just assimilate and say, this person is too sensitive and I don’t need  to accommodate her point. 

I don’t need to. .

And then I accommodated her point. And I thought to myself, You grew up pretty religious, Mónica. You know the second commandment is, thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain. I even remember a time when that was really important to me. Where it would offend me.  And I’m, I have peeled away from that, but here I am, like, I’m trying to do work where I embrace the fact that we need to stay open to different perspectives, and where I’m actually trying to influence the world’s ability to hear each other, and to, and so the fact that I would think that because I find this word what… I hate to say it, but I do I find it fun when I use it. Sometimes…

April:

(laughs)

Mónica:

I find it like an emphasis  and exciting and edgy. And it’s how I speak to a lot of my friends. Yeah. But who are my friends? 

A lot of, most of them are not very religious. So I haven’t had that feedback. And so it was a really really humbling thing.

So I thought about it again. And we did issue a reprint. And I did take out that word. Because she was right. But each time. Each time when I first heard the criticism. And then when I first heard the suggestion. I wanted to push back. But then I just reflected and so it wasn’t her or her review that changed my mind. It was the thinking that I did, the reflecting that I did, as a result of what she said,  that changed my mind 

April:

Wow. I’m impressed that you got there. And I think that it’s a complicated thing because profanity is also a way of it’s I think part of overall code switching that the reason that we have all this complicated architecture around what words mean you’re in and what words mean you’re out is because we are so wired for the social.

There are parts of the non-religious sort of disaffected communities in the country left or right that for whom that’s part of speaking plainly as opposed to some highfalutin’ intellectual. And so I really respect that you were able to take in that feedback. 

Mónica:

Right, right. And you and I have had conversations about, language. It’s so complicated. And sometimes when you try to speak a language that is for everyone, it ends up missing anything that’s powerful for anyone. And so it’s just funny how that works. 

And the thing that really sticks out to me from David McRaney is all persuasion is self persuasion.

It was my thinking that changed my mind as a result of the strength of that critique that she offered. And that’s all it took.

April:

I told you that in the last 24 hours, since I listened to the interview, I’ve already quoted David’s work. And the thing I quoted was that all persuasion is self-persuasion and it’s just huge. And I think that one of the big reasons to try to say things in a way that the other party can hear is that. You may not persuade them then, but that will enter, that will marinate and it’ll become part of your relationship and part of their world. And so..yeah, but it may be just that it takes longer than you might. Expect,

Mónica:

Exactly.

So I wanna hear about your moment, April. What’s a time that you’ve changed your mind or changed someone or feel like you influenced someone else’s mind?

April:

So, I grew up, in a liberal household as I’ve talked about. And when I was in high school, George Bush was in office and in inside my home, there was a very strong, rebellion against the idea that we should be in Iraq, that I don’t know, Maureen Dowd wrote a book called Shrub, which made fun of George Bush. I thought it was great and was just very who is the US? Who are we to be invading other countries? And I was pleased when President Obama took a more, not exactly isolationist, but like non- interventionist policy. But then something interesting happened, which is I got a job a couple years after college, working in the. defense and intelligence world. And I didn’t change immediately, but there was something about going into that office day after day and being exposed to the threats that come in against the US day after day. And. Thinking carefully about how do we protect the country?

How do we anticipate the things that could go wrong? Who’s motivated to make things go wrong? And also but actually just like reading the words of threat over and over, and noticing how vulnerable we are actually like people like to rag on the intelligence community because they only find out what it misses,

But it’s astonishing all the things that they catch and protect us from. And so within not very long, my view on it completely changed. It changed in a quiet way. I wasn’t aware that my mind was changing as it was changing.

But, that was one of the most I’m in some ways a national security voter. Like I vote on a relatively small number of issues and national security is one of them and that’s why it drives me crazy that the Republican party and Donald Trump are seemingly less skeptical of Russia, because I spent a lot of time with people who had worked for decades in the cold war and understood what that nation will do.

To give you a sense of how fully my demeanor on this has shifted, I’ve gone from being somebody who was like, “Who does the US think we are?” to somebody who gets really frustrated when people say that kind of thing, because usually if I get a chance to say to them “would you rather have China in charge?” They say, of course, not. But I feel like people take the privilege of dissent from a safe place in a nation that has reasonable ethical standards that it doesn’t always live up to for granted. And yeah, that. That changed me pretty fully.

Mónica:

I’m thinking about how the terror of social death is greater than the terror of physical death. And, April. In a group of people with whom she had beforehand agreed with these statements about the United States and then April afterward, was there a fear of social death from saying you…

April:

Oh, my high school friends completely freaked out when I told them I had become conservative. but the really difficult conversations were with my family. That was the part where it was painful for years. My friends were more just confused, but I was at the time The people around me were different people. And so it was a lot easier to maintain my views then.

Mónica:

Wow. Yep. Yep. 

Ah, amazing. Thank you for  sharing that. So the next, question is,

What strategies will you take from, this conversation with David McRaney about persuasion and how minds change to apply to your own work and life going forward?

What did you hear that really stood out to you as, oh I’m gonna do that. I’m gonna try 

April:

These things are always a little bit unnerving because we think we believe things for logical reasons, and then it turns out a lot of it’s rationalization, like a lot of it. And I think one thing is, I just want to try to be aware of that, I have a background in debate and particularly in competitive debate, you’re taught how to speak eloquently to defend pretty much anything. And so that works inside your brain as well as towards other people. And so I am on a sort of overall journey in life towards being more connected to my core. And one piece of that is noticing when I’m doing motivated reasoning. Saying, wait a second. I, there’s a something raw under that. I don’t, this is not about logic for me.

And then the other one is, I loved all of this. Also, just to say that, the idea that social death is greater than physical death is something that I have intuitively understood my whole life and I want to help our society understand how important social connections are because I think that’s that drives so much and act as though power dynamics and financial incentives and things like that are the primary driver, but I really think it’s social. One other thing so we’ve already mentioned the quote, “all persuasion is self-persuasion” and that’s important to me in a couple of ways. And I think the primary one is that, the idea that all persuasion is self-persuasion means that, the things I’m doing that seem to be failure might not be.

Mónica:

Exactly.

…That I might be doing what I. can, which is showing them something and showing them, this is really important. And the fact that they don’t seem to change their mind right then doesn’t actually mean I’ve failed.

Mónica:

Isn’t that amazing? No, I think you just  nailed it! You just

April: it’s a 

Mónica:

I’m thinking back to Yes, I’m thinking back to Carolyn. Back to Carolyn, the woman who wrote that review, and I don’t think that she was trying to change my mind. She just wanted to say her piece. And then she, and that was it. Because of that, there was a way I could kind of receive it.

April:

Huh. and go away.

Mónica: and go away. 

And she wasn’t there trying to “Hey hey hey” This this this”. So, I’ve wondered about that. I don’t like to think that my brain is the kind of brain that doesn’t just accept the better idea.

April:

Huh.

Mónica:

None of our brains are the kinds of brains that know how to just accept the better idea. 

April:

So we’re better off knowing it.

We’re  just not Right. So really it’s about the approach, it’s about the respect for the mind and the heart. It’s, there’s something about that and  ugh, and It’s so annoying  because what that means is that persuasion has very little to do with mastery of the subject that you happen to be talking about because that’s the part that’s you cannot shame people  into changing their minds. And we keep trying, don’t we? 

April:

Yes. And I think that they’re hyper, like people are, their antennae are out for that. And so they’ll pick it up.

Mónica:

Yeah, it’s, you don’t feel respected, you don’t feel accepted, and that I think is one of the toughest things people face when it comes to, really being good advocates for your side of an issue. And here we go, maybe this is controversial, get ready. 

…is that, if you want to have a chance at influencing somebody on what they think of something, you have to, at a very fundamental level, accept what they think right now. You have to accept what they think right now. Not agree with it, but you have to accept it. Because if you can’t accept it, you can’t hear them. You can’t. You’re just gonna be too guarded, you have to…

April:

So let’s, can we apply that to, Let’s take the sexual violence one is clearer. I don’t want to accept.

Mónica: 

Right? 

April:

I find it a part of the worst things, like in religious language, I would say Satan’s handiwork in the world. I would say this is some of the stuff that makes a lot of people pretty clear that there’s no God, and I don’t want to accept that. I don’t want to accept any hint of that. and so is there a difference, how are you using the word accept? Because, I can accept the people.

Mónica:

Yes, and maybe that’s it. But I do think you have to accept in the moment of interacting with this person, the fact that this person currently believes this idea. You have to accept that, or else, how can you possibly do any of the things that could actually allow your way of seeing this issue to influence the other person? If you don’t start where they are, you cannot argue from where they are,

April:

True. And, this is where faith and faith-based concepts are essential for me engaging this way. And so my question, I’m going to outline how I do that. And I want to know as a secular person, like, how do you do that?

Because I don’t know how to do it without religious concepts. So what it sounds like in my heart is. I am encountering part of the brokenness of the world and the fact that we’re fallen and there’s fundamental evil, and I don’t have to drown in that because I have faith that there is ultimate hope, that there is an actor in the world that is, fighting for the good and that there’s something. It’s, I can work with the idea that we are, have the divine within us and also are broken. What I can’t work with is the idea that this is existing in the world and this is happening and that’s it. Like I, I will give up. So for me, it gets into the sin and redemption thing. How do you do that without a religious concept?

Mónica:

Yeah, I’m trying to answer that question for myself. Let me give it a shot.

Oh boy, what a hard question. I believe that there is this extraordinary sort of communion, and I don’t mean that in the religious sense, that can exist between people who are really connected. I have, for a long time, sensed that extremely connected conversation with another person. is one of the reasons I’m alive. It makes me feel so alive.

April:

Me too.

Mónica:

And, I think I have been in many situations where it has made the other person feel very alive as well. That state, utter connection is impossible to reach without openness to everything about the other person. You have to get there at some point. And by openness, I don’t mean agreement at all. But I do mean,  there’s a way in which somehow, I feel like I can abide here. That and it has to be reciprocal. It, to some degree, it has to be reciprocal.

It’s a hearing and being heard. It’s a both and so I feel like I have reached that place, even with people who hold some ideas that I would never, And then, what happens for me is I find people really fascinating. They’re really interesting. And so, I don’t know, April I don’t know what I’ll think about hearing myself back later as I say this.

I’m trying to be honest but, there’s a state where, it’s, look, there’s no audience. It’s just me and this other person. And I don’t feel tainted by helping this person make a space to explore themselves. I also really enjoy the space that makes for me to explore myself.

I emerge from those kinds of conversations transformed every single time, even in a small way. Every single time, even in a small way. Every single time.

So anyway, it’s if there’s a kind of faith parallel that I have that isn’t religious, I think human beings have this enormous capacity to calibrate to each other and open their minds to each other. And that is one of the most magical places I have ever been. And I love it. I love it so much. I live for it. There was actually a long time where my password was a kind of motto that I made about how I live for great conversation.

The fact that you are connecting is what allows transformation and so to come back to the prompts that we’re doing, it’s how do I want to apply these strategies to my life?

It’s made me think of when do I want to be persuasive? When do I want to be persuasive? And here’s the truth. I don’t know how this will sound,

April:

Yeah. Let’s hear it.

Mónica:

I want to influence my world at all times. I want my experience and the way that I have seen things to matter. And so that means that when I come into contact with others, who have seen things maybe a different way, I want my light to become part of their light.

It’s almost just the most practical. It comes down to me as the most practical thing. Unless I hear them, they’re not gonna hear me. Unless I receive them, they can’t receive me. So, If I want to be influential, because I like to think that some of the things I’ve seen are, good for others to know, or share, or pick up.

And I’m not trying to be, like, arrogant. I think this  is true for every human being. I think probably most human beings want to influence the world they’re in some way. The people around them in some way, they want to matter. It’s a miracle, it’s amazing  that we are creatures who can benefit from the experience of many humans beyond just ourself. Isn’t that nuts?

April:

Yeah.

Mónica:

That’s my best attempt to answer your question. Woo!

April:

Good job. Thank you for taking a stab. I know that was one of those can you tell me the meaning of life in four sentences kinds of questions. 

So one just follow up question as to what you said, I, I see this in you. And so there’s a part of me that intuitively understands, but the thing that I’m really, that I struggle with is evil. how do I be compassionate to a person whose beliefs and actions have some evil in them? And of course, probably we are all that way, but that’s the part, that’s where I get tripped up on the road to communion with another person…?

Mónica:

No, and that’s where, most of us do. Yeah, and I don’t  want to make it seem like I can be like, Zen-like to everyone and every issue all the time. I, please, don’t anyone believe that. I am my own worst enemy on this. You know me, April. I’m really fiery. I lose my temper with people. This is not a perfect kind of practice. I just, it’s the ideal for me and I’ve gotten there and it’s great. 

April:

Why doesn’t the evil thing get in your way? 

Mónica:

The evil thing…? 

April:

Yeah. Like when you’re interacting with someone where like you can watch them, you can practice, I feel like I can see the bad events happening because of 

Mónica:

Do you know why? Do you know why? 

I’m just gonna say

April: me. Tell me! 

Mónica: What it’s like …it hurts to get it out ‘cause what if I’m evil for saying it, April? 

I believe, that if you dig down deep enough, you can get beneath what looks like evil in a human heart. I believe that. But it has to be It has to be one on one, is what I believe. It has to be in a contained place, is what I believe. You have to reach that level of reception? Almost Like, a radio signal? Can you get this person clearly? Is what I believe. Once we are in the mode of war, and of armies, and of structures, and  of castles, and of people being far away, then look! 

Evil is what evil is, because you can’t even reach there anymore. So to  me  I feel like evil becomes what we think of it as when we get so far away from each other that there’s no more reception. That’s where I think evil really lies, is in the distance between us.

That’s where it grows. I, just, what I’ve seen in life gives me that faith, and it’s not a religious faith, maybe but it’s a faith in a human person, that I just don’t believe, that the worst person any of us have ever heard of, if you could, for some of them, maybe it would have taken so many hours of conversations that it’s practically impossible, but I don’t think it’s actually impossible with any of them.

That, I think you can get beneath what looks like evil, and you will find a human heart  that wants to do its best. Every. Single. Time. You talked about woundedness?

That can mess us up. That can make it really hard to reach. Extremely hard. I’ve heard from so many people you’ve had to give up on their families or their relatives because they’re just so hard to reach at that point. But even  then, I don’t think it’s impossible. It’s just so unlikely that we just have to move on. And in the case of evil, so unlikely that you just have to f… You just have to fight.  with everything you’ve got to stop them from doing what they’re doing. That’s war. That’s war. And sometimes wars are just, right? But I still think it begins with distance between people. 

April:

That’s really interesting.

Mónica:

I don’t know, man.

April:

I think I agree?

Mónica:

I don’t know. But it’s okay if you don’t! Please don’t! I 

April:

I’m not sure. 

Mónica: Again, I might socially die just for…saying that…

April:

You’re not gonna socially die! See I have a bipolar approach to this in the sense that I basically never cut people out of my life. Sometimes they have chosen to leave my life, but I believe in unconditional love in that way.

And yes, there are limits to what I can tolerate just like any human being. But I believe in never saying never. I don’t believe in permanent cutoff, But I don’t know. So you don’t have to worry about social death with me and I’m grateful that you’re saying things that feel risky. Really?

Mónica:

And to our listeners, yeah, it’s it’s funny, right? April and I have these conversations and April, you and I are recording and there’s no one else here to hear. And it just feels like that one-on-one conversation, but we also know that it’s a public conversation. And so we know that people are ultimately going to hear this. And so there is that fear, but somehow that state, yeah. That I was  talking about exists right now. And there’s something about that  makes it like, who cares what people think later? Because there is something just profound that is trying to get communicated and asked and learn from each other that is so much more important than what anyone else might think later. And so that, that’s like the primacy of that, is part of what gives me so much hope. 

(music under and up)

Mónica:

Well, that conversation took us to some interesting and unexpected places.

Making space for another mind to explore itself is scary. Mysterious? Exciting? Yeah, sometimes exciting, but scary. I’m not sure I’ve ever recorded a conversation as vulnerable as that one.

And with a friend as welcoming and curious as April, and well, thank you, I guess. Thank you all for building this space with us where apparently, we can be that open and honest with you.

I hope very much that each of you find spaces where you too can be open and honest with other people and let your mind change and challenge itself, just as much as it wants, about politics or anything else. And so concludes our deep dive into those mighty and mysterious minds that we all carry around with us.

All persuasion is self-persuasion, says David. 

(music out)

Mónica:

Maybe that’s not just a lesson about how we change our minds. Maybe it’s occurring to me, it’s also a lesson in the power we each have to construct our world and the challenges that come when we dare to build a good world together.

(music up)

With that, I’m ready to send you brave souls back to your worlds with a song. It’s called Standards of Thought by Akil Dasan, and it was an entry in the 2023 Braver Angels competition.Take a listen. 

(song lyrics)

🎶Control your emotions. Feels good. Feels good to feel good Outstanding, critical thinking, question everything until it’s instinctive. Standards I accept and…

(vocal and music under)

Mónica:

Thank you everyone so much for joining us on A Braver way. If this episode sparked questions or stories you want to share, we’re here. You can always reach us at ABraverWay@braverangels.org or join our text line by texting the word brave to 206 -926-9955.

A Braver Way is produced by Braver Angels and distributed in partnership with KUOW and Deseret News. We get financial support from the MJ Murdoch Charitable Trust and Reclaim Curiosity and count USAFacts as a proud sponsor.

Our senior producer and editor is David Albright. Our producer is Jessica Jones. My disagreement buddy is April Lawson. Our theme music is by the fantastic, number one billboard bluegrass-charting hip -hop band, Gangstergrass. A special thanks to Ben Caron, Don Goldberg, Gabbi Timmis, and Katelin Annes. And to everyone out there who’s been sharing this podcast with your friends and family or who’s written a review to help someone else check it out and see

 if it’s for them.

That has been awesome. I’m your host and guide across the divide, Mónica  Guzmán. Take heart, everyone. Till next time.

(Music up..”Joy and happiness…”)

(music under)

Braver Angels is the nation’s largest cross-partisan, volunteer-led movement to bridge the political divide and the organization that produces this podcast. And here’s the exciting part. You can join us in our mission to overcome toxic polarization and strengthen our Democratic Republic. Head to braverangels.org/join to become a member and support our growing movement and let them know that A Braver Way sent you.

(music out)