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Mónica Guzmán is author of I Never Thought of it That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times; founder and CEO of Reclaim Curiosity; Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels; and host of A Braver Way podcast.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Mónica Guzmán discuss how to build trust across political divides and the joy of heated debates.
This conversation kicks off a new Persuasion series on the value of pluralism. Polarization is at an all-time high. It can feel daunting—perhaps even misguided—to engage in meaningful dialogue with those holding starkly different views. What does it mean to champion pluralism in such a moment? Persuasion’s new series on the future of pluralism, generously supported by the Arthur Vining Davis Foundations, will feature longform essays and podcast interviews that make the case for civic dialogue and highlight inspiring examples of it in practice.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: We’re once again in a political time that is very emotional. It’s very easy to start thinking not just that certain people in positions of high authority, but also those who support them, must be ill-intentioned, have the wrong kind of values, or wish ill on people. I can feel the political culture rising again, that kind of proud refusal of dialogue with others, of being proud to say, I don't even want to talk to those people because of all of the evil that they're doing and the fact that they're probably terrible human beings. Do you ever waver from the importance and the need to speak to people across the political divide? How would you make the case in this fraught political moment that it really is important for Americans to continue speaking to each other irrespective of where they are on the political spectrum?
Mónica Guzmán: That's the question right now. Because you're right, I have sensed a few steps back for folks. There's so much fear and uncertainty, and there's all kinds of swift action that's making a lot of folks on the left just pretty freaked out. Some folks on the right too. But do I waver from the idea that it’s critically important to talk to folks across political differences? No, not at all. In fact, I feel more committed to that than ever because of the fear and the uncertainty that's sweeping across the whole country right now, because it feels like reactionary politics and a sense of recklessness is more normal. It makes perfect sense to me given the recklessness and rashness and reactionary nature of the way we talk to each other. I just think that the way we talk affects the way we think and the way we think affects the way we act.
People say, there will be harm if I talk to this person, or there's harm in that idea, so therefore opening the box of that idea by talking to that person releases harm. What I say to that is, look, there may be harm in some of those things in some situations, but the deepest harm comes from non-engagement. The least democratic thing we can do is disengage and continue to participate in a vicious cycle where we’re judging each other more while engaging with each other less.
If you follow that to its logical conclusion, what are our judgments based on? It's not what each other actually thinks. It's just the hearsay, the hyperbole, the media signals. We’re spinning away from each other. That’s the most anti-democratic thing that there is.
Mounk: It’s important to remember that lots of Americans continue to be in very mixed political environments, but, especially in the more elite circles of America, I think there are many who've entered political bubbles, whether that is a deeply conservative political bubble in some affluent town or suburb, or more progressive bubbles that you and I, and probably many of my listeners, are more accustomed to in certain college towns, in New York or LA, or in certain other big cities in the country.
Now, I think if you're in a bubble like that, it makes you a little bit nervous to speak to people who are very different in terms of their basic worldviews and basic assumptions. There’s an invented set of reasons for why we shouldn't speak to each other—I shouldn't even have to expose myself to that discomfort. If this person doesn't agree with my view on Trump, or this person doesn't agree with my view on racial justice, then they're just not worthy of equal respect. And conservatives of a certain form might have exactly the same set of defenses.
What argument would you make to those people?
Guzmán: We tend to misperceive things with enormous frequency. Things like, the other side is motivated by ill will. But if you don't get close enough to folks, it's almost impossible to determine that. A lot of times, it's that they don't have the same variables that you do, the variables that you used in your equation to make your political choice. It's easy to assume that yours are all the variables there are. Therefore, if somebody came to a different choice, it must be because they're a bad person. They took these same variables and they came out with this. Like, that's crazy. But it isn't until you get close enough that you see there are other variables in play. Social research shows over and over again that across the political divide, we misperceive, we exaggerate tremendously. This is on both sides.
Now that doesn't mean there aren't people acting in bad faith. That doesn't mean there aren't people who are, for example, so consumed by hate that they are worth fearing. But every time we've asked the question and tried to kind of scientifically take a look, we see that we're getting it wrong all the time. If someone disagrees with me on trans issues, or abortion, or immigration, what exactly do they disagree with me on? We also see over and over again that issues like that are a lot more nuanced than we give them credit for. There's an enormous overlap, for example, on immigration policy when you actually ask people what they believe. The perceptions people have make it look like we're just living on two different planets. It's not true.
Since the first live Q&A was really fun, we’ll try to make this a monthly feature! So please join me for the second iteration on Monday, March 31 at 6pm Eastern. I will once again try to answer any questions you may have—whether about my writing, the current state of the world, or what might happen next. Join us on Zoom here. —Yascha
Mounk: There’s been good research by our friends at More in Common about this issue. Most progressives in America think that conservatives don't want to teach the history of slavery in schools, that they don't think of Martin Luther King Jr. as an American hero and so on. But that is simply wrong. You ask conservatives and they do want to teach about slavery in schools—not every single conservative, but a huge majority. And they do think of Martin Luther King Jr. as a hero. It’s the same the other way around: you ask Republicans or conservatives how they perceive the views of Democrats and they're gonna say, well, Democrats think that patriotism is a bad thing and they think that George Washington was a bad person, but when you look at Democrats that's not true. A majority actually think that patriotism is good and that George Washington was a heroic founder of the United States.
Guzmán: Right. And as a result, most Americans are having projected debates. They're not even real debates. They're happening at a performative level, and they're not grounded in what people actually think. They're only grounded in what people think people think, so we're all these layers away from reality right now.
The other thing is, if you feel really strongly about your views—awesome, that's great. We all need our convictions and our passions. Chances are you really want there to be a world where more folks agree with you and more folks see it your way. And you want the way you think about things to matter, so you want persuasion to be effective in American life. But persuasion cannot be effective in American life if we’re not engaging across political differences in ways that mean people can both hear and be heard.
The more that you shame, the more that you vilify, the more that you push people away from wanting to hear you, and the more that you push yourself away from wanting to hear them, you're going to assume all those bad intentions. You're going to make the pernicious assumption that people who disagree with you on these very core things must be crazy, stupid, or evil. Or you're gonna believe another cognitive fallacy that if you oppose what I support, you must hate what I love. And you're gonna give yourself a sort of moral reason not to engage.
But again, if your goal is to fight for this cause, you need genuine good faith engagement with your actual opponents. First, to see if they really are your opponents in the ways that you project. I always say whoever is underrepresented in your life is gonna be overrepresented in your imagination. You've got to correct your imagination with reality and you have to get close to their true perspective one way or another.
If you can have the conversations where you're heard or you're at least seen and have to be abided in one way or another, then persuasion might really work. But it's going to take a lot for persuasion to come back into American life, given the depths of distrust that exist. I think that that's just the deepest harm of all.
Mounk: I agree with you that actually we probably agree about a lot more than the extreme polarization of our public discourse indicates. Now, the point where you might get pushback is to say, all right, but even though there might be some things we agree on, and even though I might sympathetically understand how they came to the wrong conclusion about those things where we do disagree, the stakes are really high right now. We're trying to figure out whether to continue supporting Ukraine, and—I'm obviously betraying my own political views here—whether to support Ukraine in a defensive war against an aggressor that's trying to annex a lot of its territory, or whether to be a neutral arbiter between those two things as though they were on the same moral plane.
Perhaps if I really listen to the arguments that people have, they might make some strong points. There might be some honorable set of reasons for how they came to this view. But in the end, what matters is that they're on the wrong side of an important moral issue. And why should I waste time speaking to them, trying to persuade them, rather than rallying my own side, making sure that we are activated to fight for this important cause? How would you respond to that kind of objection?
Guzmán: It's a great point. My response is that you can't fight for your cause and be an effective activist in this world with its media culture and its political culture without checking your projections of what you're even fighting against. If you're fighting ghosts, you're going to be more scared. Activism has become really uninformed in the ways that it needs to be because of this lack of dialogue.
I think part of the point you're bringing up is that dialogue is not sufficient and I couldn't agree more. I think that there is a danger in dialogue for its own sake or dialogue that is supposed to what, supplant action? Like, no, that doesn't make sense. There are high-stakes issues out there. But what I see is avoidance that's being conflated with courage. People think of themselves as doing really good by their cause by writing a social media post that gets tons of likes. Have they persuaded anyone on the other side? Have they effected change with that? And the answer is no, because it's mostly siloed. And if someone on the other side is looking at what you've said, they're doing it with a mindset of picking up ammo and launching it back at you. There is very little courage in such a divided world in shaming the other side for what they believe. It doesn't work.
I think real change happens with action combined with good faith dialogue to check in with what the opposition really is and check in with those folks.
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Mounk: I have a reflection about cancel culture that's loosely related to that. There's been a debate for the last 10 years about whether cancel culture is on the left or on the right. I think the insight you shared is that if you’re in left-leaning institutions, then right-wing cancel culture is completely irrelevant to you because when the supposed adversary or opponent criticizes you, that’s an honor. The fact that Fox News gets upset about something you wrote might lead to some really unpleasant emails in your inbox, but to just about every professor in the country, that is something where they turn up on campus the next day and whether they admit it to themselves or not, they have a little proud smile. But if it is your own side that says you are secretly racist, homophobic, sexist, whatever it is, then you're fearing the next faculty meeting, you're fearing showing up the next day.
Now, of course, if your social circle or your professional circle or your audience is right-leaning, then the opposite is true. If you're a conservative commentator and MSNBC gets upset about you, well, you have that same slightly proud smile. This is going to validate to your followers that you're on their side and that you're courageous.
We tend to think of our political system as stuck because every election for the last 10 or 15 years has been pretty tight. And so it feels as though this is sort of liberal America standing against conservative America, and it's just a question of mobilization. But I've argued for a long time that that is a misreading of the electoral data. When you look at who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and who voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, those two groups are strikingly different from who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 and who voted for Kamala Harris in 2024. There's a lot of people who are persuaded in both directions. Now, I guess it raises the question: is the case for persuasion instrumental, intrinsic, or both? Do you think it's important for activists to engage in persuasion because it’s this one cool hack to actually win? Or is there a more fundamental argument that irrespective of the efficacy of this kind of engagement, it's the right thing to do? And if so, why?
Guzmán: What a fascinating question. I mean, it is instrumental. I think there are techniques in politics like deep canvassing, which is a technique where folks who are fighting for a certain cause, let's say LGBTQ issues, knock on doors and they come inside and they talk for an hour, mostly asking questions about people’s beliefs. What deep canvassing does is it helps people actually unpack what they believe and take a look at it, in the presence of someone who's curious and interested. Sometimes when people do that, it's a gift because how often are we confronted with our own opinions in that generous way that invites us to explore it? When people do that, they often realize that there are these tensions that are really tricky and they'll choose to resolve it a different way and they'll end up changing their minds.
Also, you were asking if there is a principle here that goes deeper? I think there absolutely is. There are so many benefits from doing things like this. One that comes to mind, especially thinking about the current moment, is that the world becomes a less scary place. And it's nice to live in a world that is less scary.
There's a lot of anxiety that people are feeling right now on the left. This is not to diminish the very real awful things that are happening. I've had people lose their jobs because of what's going on with the federal government. I've got folks in universities who are traumatized right now. It's terrible. But what makes the trauma and the fear so much worse is a sense that all these people on the other side want me to be hurt because they are crazy, stupid, or evil.
People end up silencing and diminishing themselves. I've seen it happen with a lot of folks in my world. That's not what we want. I think if we could see the truth of what's in people's hearts, it would not match the level of severity that we project onto them. So what happens if you lift at least some of that off? Well, what happens is you become more powerful. You’re able to be more creative. We know this from the neurobiology of fear. We are all the descendants of people who ran away from the bear. Fear is a superpower. It is great. But don't waste your fear on anything but danger because fear will also shut down your ability to judge. It’ll shut down your ability to be creative and to be collaborative.
The more that we have these conversations, you're going to see the nuance there and you're going to see the goodness in people's hearts. Once you see that, you're going to be like, if the world's a little less scary, then I can maybe think better about the world and I can be a more effective change agent in the direction that I want to go. One thing about persuasion that is so important is that people feel a lot of belonging around their beliefs. Maybe they are—to take kind of a deviant example—like a 9/11 conspiracy theorist, for example. There's a lot of belonging in that community, they're very close-knit with each other. So there's a cost to changing your mind. There's a cost for some communities because there are so many threads to belonging and a sense of identity around what they believe.
So if we're going to get underneath that to really persuade all these folks who have made their opinions their identity, then what we need to do is give them another home. If they're going to change their mind, they have to feel that there's another home to go to. But if we are just hostile and shaming and excluding and burning bridges, then there’s no home for people to change their minds into—there’s no other community to join. Therefore, the cost is too high. This applies to all of us. We have to be able to move each other.
Mounk: That's really interesting and powerful. I always thought that conspiracy theories can actually be quite comforting, because the truth is that the world is complicated and chaotic and nobody has full control over it. That means that things might spiral out of control and we might not be able to master certain kinds of problems. The idea of a conspiracy theory is superficially scary because there's these bad people who have their designs on the world and they're in control. But it's actually quite comforting because it suggests that if we're able to replace them and uncover the evil scheme and put decent people in power, then suddenly all of these problems are going to be solved. So it's actually a very comforting view. Now, you are also right to note, conversely, that changing your mind so that you no longer assume that people on the other side of the political spectrum must be bad and evil makes the world a lot less scary.
That too, I think, is particularly illustrated by parts of the trans debate. You know, it's one thing to say that there are disagreements about the ease and the extent to which 13, 14, 15-year-olds should be able to undergo gender transitions. Whether or not you have to ultimately agree with them, the people who have concerns in this area are motivated by the well-being of those children. They worry that this is not medically fully researched, that perhaps it's going to have really bad lifelong side effects, that it might lead to these kids being infertile, it might lead to some people having big regrets and wanting to detransition. Even if you think they're wrong about all of those things, those are not evil motivations. Those are motivations that should be legible to everybody.
But if you cast this as: a) they deny my existence, and b) they don't want me to exist, they would be happy if I was dead—which is a verbal sleight of hand that happens a lot in this discussion—well, that's a really scary view of the world. Anybody who encourages kids to have that view of the world should be really ashamed of themselves because it’s trying to get impressionable people to have a lot of fear that, for all of the genuinely high stakes in this debate, is often misplaced.
Guzmán: Yes, and it justifies the most extreme actions. Because if someone's trying to kill you, then everything is on the table. Everything is self-defense. And a lot of our debates have gotten to that point where some of the most vocal proponents are acting with a sense that all action is justified because the most vicious and cruel and horrible attacks are coming to us. It's remarkable that we've gotten to that place. How do I engage with someone who thinks I shouldn't exist? There are several ways that you can come at this that give you more power and less fear. My friend Manu Meel is the CEO of an organization called Bridge USA, which does extraordinary cross-partisan bridging at tons of college campuses all across the country. He says that if the question you're asking yourself is, why should I talk to someone who thinks a whole group of people shouldn't exist? then the better question is, what happens if you don't?
Let me tell you a quick personal story that illustrates something that I think is quite powerful here. I'm a millennial, I'm 42. So I'm of a certain generation. Generations just have things that are kind of native to us and things that are more new, and one of the things that's more new to me is different pronouns. So I'm at this theater waiting for a friend and somebody comes up to me to introduce themselves to me. I noticed that they have these big long earrings and one of the earrings says “they” and the other earring says “them” and instantly I can kind of feel that I'm a bit uncomfortable with new pronouns. This person comes along with their earrings, introduces themselves, and then walks off and I just said “hi” and that was it. For the next 20 minutes, if someone were to be looking at me, it looked like I was just sitting there, just waiting.
What was actually happening was that I was having a really passionate conversation with myself. There was sort of the part of me that was like, I don't know, these pronouns make me really uncomfortable. And then there was a part of me going, huh, if I were like that person, wouldn't I want the pronouns that I want billboarded easily so that people know how to address me so that I'm not constantly reminded that folks aren't seeing me the way I see myself? Those two parts of me were just wrestling. And at the end of those 20 minutes, I felt a little less uncomfortable with new pronouns. I say all that because I think that sometimes the best way to argue against someone who thinks you shouldn't exist is to continue to exist in their presence. It doesn't all have to be a fight. It doesn't all have to be a logical string of arguments. We just have to continue to be present with each other.
I have a good friend who's gay and the day after the 2024 election, I called him and I said, “yeah, what's your reaction?” I had a lot of folks who were just staying home and feeling afraid for all these reasons. And he said, “today I’m going to be as gay and as out there in the world and as proud of my gayness as I possibly can.” I saw something really empowering in that. I'm choosing issues that are sort of more friendly to the way the left views the world. But this can apply to folks who believe that religious liberty is under threat in America, folks who believe that all kinds of things around patriotism or love of country are being disrespected. I've learned so much from the conservatives in my life, from my parents to some of my very best friends. I'm so grateful for the perspectives that they've given me. It's been wonderful. So what happens if you don't talk to folks who think a certain group shouldn't exist? Then I guess we'll all entrench in those views and we'll just continue to be at war in a democracy, which makes no sense.
Mounk: That's a great way of putting it. So let's assume that listeners are convinced by your case for the importance of actually engaging with each other. If that is the case, what should one do? What should listeners do if they’re in a deeply conservative bubble or in a deeply liberal progressive bubble?
Guzmán: One misconception that I've run into a lot in this work is about what harms might come when we bridge these divides. I think people tend to think of the worst-case scenario first. So let's be clear. The ask is not, go talk to a Nazi tomorrow. The ask is not, you're gonna wake up in the morning and be a Zen master of curiosity. It's about wherever you are, find your edge. Now, also you might say, I'm in a really blue city like Seattle and all my friends are liberal. We agree on everything. And I would say, are you sure? Because the blindness of toxic polarization also blinds one side to itself and to the nuance that exists there. So I bet you know somebody who will probably disagree with you on immigration, will probably disagree with you on abortion. instead of assuming that you all agree just because you voted for the same candidate, go and ask about that and get into the weeds and you'll see that you actually do disagree. Build the muscle there, practice there. You don't have to seek opportunities with the person who is the most different from you.
Now, if you are with someone who is quite different from you, then cool. Here, the strategy is don't try to take it all in in one bite. It's about short conversations, bit by bit. There's a lot of research that shows that some of the best conversations are had while you're doing something, not where you're sitting showdown style facing each other. Even if it's for five minutes, you're going to talk about what was on Fox News last night. Five minutes, then you're going to move on. This is why conversations in cars are so awesome because it's people sitting next to each other. This is why we make road trip movies and they're coming-of-age. If I'm meeting with someone and it's in a cafe, I try not to sit across from them. It's somatic. It's a lot about the body and what we do. I mean, we're mimetic creatures. Research shows over and over again, if one person tends to make a certain gesture, or if one person tends to use certain language even, we tend to adopt each other's tones and mannerisms. When we are facing each other and we have fears about each other, then eye contact becomes uncomfortable, becomes a reminder of difference. It becomes a little trigger of fear. There's all kinds of things that can get activated that way.
When you are next to each other, then many of us just tend to be a little more liberated from that, so you can kind of slow it down. If you want to go talk to Uncle Bob about that tough thing that some Democratic politician or Republican politician is doing, and Uncle Bob likes to go fishing and you don't mind going fishing, go fishing with Uncle Bob and bring it up there when.
But I'm really saying two things. And one thing is about the somatic experience or the posture or the gesture or the approach to each other. But the other one is we tend to sometimes build this up in our heads, like I'm going to talk to Uncle Bob. He's going to give me the answers I need. I'm going to be really open. But then we have these big expectations. For example, I talked to Uncle Bob for an hour and I asked him all the questions and he never asked me any questions. He wasn't being curious. It didn't work. I'm not going to do that again. We're done. That's one thing people say. Or people just start to get really impatient—why do they believe what they believe? If you've built enough trust, maybe they'll tell you. But it doesn't satisfy you, so you keep pushing. That's not right.
One of the biggest tips I have is instead of asking “why,” ask “how.” Ask versions of the question “how.” Don't ask, why do you disagree with me on abortion? Why do you think this way about Trump? Ask, how did you come to believe what you believe about elections? “How” is a question of stories. And who is the world's reigning expert on my story? Me. And who's the world's reigning expert on your story? You. So we get to kind of skirt around many of the accusations that your sources are wrong. That's one benefit. But also when people are in that showdown mode, when we have distrust across the divide and somebody asks you why you believe what you believe, you feel really on the spot. Maybe you freeze a little bit in your mind because this is going to be scary. So what you do is you go and your mind searches for the talking points that you heard on social media or on the news. Then you're not actually having the conversation about yourself and your actual beliefs. You tend to go and have the proxy conversations you've seen others have. It won't work. It's not going to change their mind.
Mounk: I also worry that it could lead to a conversation that falls into the opposite kind of trap. When I think about politics, I've learned over the years that there are very smart, well-informed people with radically different views from mine. It's very easy to get things wrong about politics, to have an assumption about what's going to happen that turns out to be really wrong. I'm very sympathetic to the idea that none of us have a full grasp on the truth.
I think we're in a moment of very rapid change right now, and not enough people are slowing down to think about what the nature of that change is and what's going to happen. You can be horrified by many of the things that are going on—and I am—but I don't think, just purely intellectually, that is a good excuse not to think really hard about why it is that some of the old order is breaking apart, and what the range of possibilities is for what the new order will look like. I think having a lot of epistemic humility is generally good, particularly in this moment. Now, what I don't believe is that politics is just a matter of my truth and your truth, that ultimately there are no right answers to any of those questions. There are going to be issues where it's genuinely a question of priorities and values and trade-offs and very reasonable people can come to very different views about this and perhaps there is no right answer. But there are some political questions for which I think there is ultimately a right answer.
So, encouraging people to say, tell me about this belief, tell me about how you came to think this—obviously this opens up the conversation in a way that I think is really helpful and gets us into the meat of it. But I worry that it might lead to a slightly unsatisfying result where now I can anthropologically describe you, and you can anthropologically describe me. But that somehow still feels a little unsatisfying. In the end, you do want to actually reason together in some kind of way. Is that the next step?
Guzmán: That’s the next step. This first piece is about building trust, about making sure people feel they can be respected and heard and that this other person they're talking to believes that they matter. We all have to get that out of the way. In this world, if you approach someone who voted for the other guy, you're going to have that fear: are they on my side or not?
Mounk: How are we thinking about those next steps?
Guzmán: The better question is, can we have a really interesting exchange? If you want a really deep intellectual conversation about the tough stuff going on in our world, you have to establish trust that you can be heard for what you really believe. Most of the time people skip all that and they go right to the banter without the trust, which is going to lead to performative behavior or a blow up or a lot of anger and then each person's going to be more entrenched in how awful the other side is and nothing gets done and nothing moves. So it is the next step. You're absolutely right that it isn't really truly satisfying without it.
Now, I have done this with my parents multiple times, and it's been awesome. Me and my mother have completely different views on everything you can imagine, and it's gotten to the point where we can even learn together. After Roe v Wade was overturned, she was overjoyed and I was crying and we're on the phone. And I told her, “Mom, I'm really worried about the precedent this sets for the Supreme Court, maybe other things like the right to gay marriage.” She was curious enough because we've established enough trust. She said, “I didn't know that, is that right? Can we look that up?”
What I'm saying is once you establish that trust, that's when you can say, okay, I hear you and I understand you, let me check my understanding. You're concerned about abortion, is that right? Yes, okay, I see it differently. Can I tell you what I mean? This works like a charm—after you've spent time listening to someone else and they really feel like you understand them, they’re going to return the favor. And then you can give your piece in a way they can actually receive. And you can tell the story of how you came to believe it.
Mounk: If a conversation gets a little bit more adversarial and a little bit more contentious, is that necessarily a bad thing? I have in mind one very close friend of mine who I’ve known for a very long time. We have some genuinely different political beliefs about the world, but more than that, we just love to think about the world and debate the world and on specific issues we'll end up with very, very different views.
Often that conversation would look incredibly unfruitful from the outside, because we do get stuck in our positions and we're trying to make arguments and hopefully some of them are good arguments, but some of them are bad arguments. We're grasping at whatever we can to demolish the other person's position. But because we have a great underlying respect for each other and because we have a relationship of trust, our friendship can withstand the heat in those moments, even if in that moment we sometimes are kind of pissed with each other. And I think in retrospect, we often change our minds.
Can there be a role for good, old-fashioned, more conflictual shouting at each other?
Guzmán: Definitely, a hundred percent. And I mean, that's heaven. That's where we all want to get to, you know? If you already have the relationship, then the heat that you give each other, like that's just crazy, that's stupid, Yascha—if somebody can tell you that, then you feel a little pang. But that pang may actually get your brain to open up a little wider. I do that with some of my friends and it is amazing—we break all the rules because we don't need them anymore. Imagine if our members of Congress could talk to each other like that. Which by the way—I've been studying American history and the folks in the Constitutional Congress did talk to each other like that. That's how they were able to form this incredible democratic republic in the first place.
In the rest of this week’s conversation, Yascha and Mónica discuss why some loud voices are encouraging people to sever ties with friends and loved ones at the drop of a hat and how to discern which bridges to build and which to burn. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
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