Any notion of reaching across these divides is seen as compromise, is seen as selling out. And yet would experience in other countries have shown and not just the Mendelos and many others, you know, we have to find a way to bridge this. Welcome to How to Citizen with Baritune Day, a podcast that reimagine citizen as a verb, not a legal status. This season is all about how we practice democracy, what can we get rid of, what can we invent, and how do we change the culture of democracy itself, relieving the theoretical clouds and hitting the ground with inspiring examples of people and institutions that are showing us new ways to govern ourselves. Throughout season four, we've spent a lot of time dreaming up and defining what a culture of democracy can look and feel like. And that collective vision is beautiful and motivating. But to build the culture we want, we also need to face the one we've got, and right now, I think that culture is conflict. Our democracy is based on this extreme version of in group outgroup. We don't just disagree, we dehumanize And I'm not a both sides kind of person. I think the right has done a lot more of this, but I've experienced it from the left too, and I know that nobody's got a monopoly on our garbage culture. We've all become more deeply entrenched in our differences, and many of us don't see or don't want to see a path toward being in community with people on the other side. Throw in guns, sensational media, and a political system that rewards outlandishness, and the division we experience looks much more like a feature than a bug Listen. Sometimes I wish everyone I disagreed with would just read that article I sent them and realize how wrong they are. Other Times I find myself asking if we can just split the country in half, call it a day. We tried, and we move on separately. But community cannot be defined by total alignment on everything. That's not community. That's a cult. And we're trying to live together better here. That's the mission, and that living together requires living with an incredible amount of difference. We've been talking a lot about bringing democracy home, but it's hard to practice democracy at home when there are members of our families we can't talk to because they've been sucked into conspiracy, because they're part of a dehumanizing political culture or their opinions and mere presence feel so opposed to our own that it's hard to practice anything with them. But if we stop trying and just accept that this is the way things are, this division will only get worse. I'm must confess that I have this fear. I fear and I feel the possibility of truly escalated armed conflict along politically divided lines in this country, something we haven't experienced on mass you know, since our Civil war, and we're not currently in that state. We're not living through that literally right now, but it's a nightmare many of us carry, and it's an actual lived reality that other people around the world have gone through quite recently. Tim Phillips and his organization Beyond Conflict have been facilitating conversations between the victims and perpetrators of extreme violence and harm for over thirty years. I reached out to hear how they've helped people work through life altering conflict so we can gain some insights into how we avoid the path that Rwanda, Northern Ireland and so many other countries have already been down. After the break my first of two conversations with Tim Phillips, which took place a few weeks after the January sixth insurrection. Tim, thank you so much for spending time with me and with us. And I'm here with you in part because I had a great experience with your organization through a gathering in downtown Los Angeles a few years back. And the specifics are no longer with me, but the emotion is my mind felt almost literally blown. I've done a lot of work around race and people feeling disconnected from each other and polarized, and there was something your facilitators did that helped us all see the world a little differently. So I just want to take this personal, selfish opportunity to thank you for that experience, thank you for training people and not just you, to do some of this work, and thanks again for making time. I'd love to start him with a more personal question. Can you tell me something about yourself that surprises you? Yeah? Thank you. That's a really good question, and surprises me is maybe this is getting very personal, but I've been doing this work internationally for over thirty years and I still struggle with feeling agency in this work, and it surprises me. But it also reflects on the challenge of the work. I think we both are trying to do, which is, how do you give people agency in this world? How do you give people a sense that they can really become agents of their own personal lives, but of the people around them. And you know, because we're coming up in thirty years and most of our work was international in the last five years, started working here in the United States, I really started reflecting on the work of the internationally to bring it home to this country. And I started really thinking about what allowed me to go overseas in my late twenties was I knew what exclusion felt like. I knew what humiliation felt like, I knew what feeling less than equal felt like, and not in a sense gave me an emotional connection to the difficulty of this work. And I think thinking about where we are as a country and the challenges we face has also been reflection on my own journey. Can I press you on the humiliation that you were familiar with, which sounds like it's helped you do this work? What was that for you? Well? I grew up the youngest of six children, grew up in a housing project here in Boston, what was used to be called veterans housing. I didn't like the fact that we lived there because I was being haunted. I was being judged. Often hearing parents will say to their son I was in school with why are you hanging out with that kid from the projects? And so that really shaped a part of me to feel, you know, I know what this shit feels like. But also I had a mother who said, no, you live in Buckingham Palace. And years later I saw the real Buckingham Palace and I said to my mother. I took out a trip to London with my sisters. I said, let me just show you. This ain't Buckingham Palace where we grew up. But the point is is that, you know, I had both nupbringing that knew what exclusion and humiliation and fear felt like. But I also had, like many people, parents who said, this isn't what defines you as a human being, in your family, in your community. But to your point about humiliation, I remember when I started going overseas in the late eighties early nineties, particularly at the end of the Cold War, when I would meet these dissidents who are now serving in government or leaders of journalism or civil society organizations. They knew what it felt like through a different lens, which is to be a victim, to keep your head down, to feel like you're always on guard and you don't really belong. And it was just really an eye opener for me about how this manifests itself on a human experience and not just defined by the country we grew up in. For someone who's never heard of beyond conflict, what is it? So it's an organization that started in nineteen ninety one when I had a chance to go to Central East in Europe at the end of the Cold War and had a chance to meet, as I mentioned earlier, as some of these dissidents who are now running these post communist countries, and I remember asking them, how do you deal with your past? How are you dealing with the legacy of repression or a dictatorship, what it did to individuals and communities. And the response was, well, that's what we talk about amongst ourselves. But that's not the help we're getting right now, because at the end of the Cold War we were getting help to write constitutions, build new democratic institutions, design market economies. Nobody can understand what we've gone through. We're being asked to manage these new governments and transitions, and we don't know where to get this help. And so that led me to this simple, what I thought, one off conference notion, or bring together these new leaders of these postcommunist countries, but with people who themselves had been through a transition from dictatorship to democracy. And in nineteen ninety one the examples were Argentina, Chile, there was a process in a couple of African countries, Spain after Franco denocification in Germany, and so I had said to some folks, you guys should do a special session bringing these new leaders of these postcommunist countries. But do it not with self described experts, but people from these other countries that struggled with these transitions, who never imagined that they could have come out the other side, almost like a big support group. And so what started as a one off conference became a second and third. But there was a real growing interest and how do we learn from the experience of others, how do we deal with our past? And of course at the end of the Cold War you normally had what happened in Eastern Europe, but at the beginning of the peace process in Northern Ireland, or the Central American Peace Accords, or the beginning of a negotiated transition in South Africa. And then on the flip side you had the disintegration of Yugoslavia and so forth. And so this whole period became ripe for work not only about how do you build democracy, but how do you deal with these countries that are coming out of brutal past. And so for these thirty years we have worked in probably seventy five countries with this notion of she had experience, meaning bringing in people to model as former enemies what change could look like. Do you remember the moment you became interested in conflict resolution? Well, I think actually in late eighties, nineteen eighty seven, I was watching the Super Bowl at the home of a woman who's sort of well known, Doris Kurrn's Goodwin and her husband Richard Goodwin at the time KG. Yeah, And I knew her had a husband through some work in a political campaign. And there was Bob Dole, Senate majority leader, and he had flown to Managua Reagan was president to criticize in ridicule the Sundinista government, and then got back on his plane and flew home and I remember seeing this in between the Super Bowl sort of innings, and I remember thinking, what just happened here? Why did he not go and actually see the leaders? Who was he playing to what's actually going on in the region. And Dick Goodwin had been the author of the Alliance for Progress as a speech for JFK, and so he had a deep tie to the region. And I remember just speaking to the two of them and saying, this is pretty incredible that you have one of the biggest issues on the foreign policy agenda of the United States and people are just sort of playing politics for domestic purposes here in the United States. Can we understand this better? And so I ended up organizing a trip to Central America with Doris Goodwin and others to see firsthand what was going on. And then I ended up meeting the Sundinista leadership at the time of Nicaragua and at the Contras in Costa Rica, the f Mellen Gorillas of El solvad Or meeting in Nicaragua because it was safe, and then people from the other side and other settings, and it was just mind blowing and it was a huge eye opener to not only the region but the nature of conflict and the fact that people can learn from each other as sort of kumbayas that sounds, but that was early at the core you set up this mentor program, this support route of people who've been through something like this before, for those who were new to the process. Democracy sponsors, if you will. Where did that support group idea come from? Where people seated in a circle holding candles? No, but you know, I think that's the nature. You're a very creative individual human being, right, Creativity just sort of emerges, right, and in this context, it just struck me that sitting in these rooms, whether it be a workshop, a conference, or sitting around a dinner table with people who are struggling with even the nose sitting across the table from their enemy and having from South Africa. Sarah Romoposa who's now president, or Rolf Mayer who was the chief negotiator for the Clerk come into a group of Protestant former paramilitary leaders in Belfast and say, you know, we're here now as friends. We just negotiated about a year ago the end of APARTEID in South Africa, and we want to ask you what is making it so difficult for you to imagine change here, and you would hear these people across the divide in Northern Ireland saying, if they could do it in South Africa, why can't we do it here? You know, if they could make peace with their enemy, then why is it we're struggling to even imagine sitting in the same room with these people. I've read too many newspapers over time, so I kind of know a lot of these names you've dropped, But could you explain for someone who may not have heard of it what was going on in Northern Ireland. So the Northern Ireland conflict lasted about thirty years, starting in the late six literally thirty years until nineteen ninety eight, and over thirty five hundred people were killed, many of the meicent civilians, and the equivalent in this country would be a million civilians being killed in the United States. And if you were a Catholic, you viewed the conflict as a legacy of centuries of repression by the British government in one form or another. If you were Protestant, many of them thought of this conflict as a thirty year aggravated crime wife. And so you had really diametrically opposed views of what the nature of the conflict was middle class, affluent Catholics tended to join if they joined a political party, the Social Democratic Labor Party led by John Hume. They wanted eventual unification with Ireland, but we're willing to do it politically and not through armed conflict or resistance. But often more working class Catholics who lived in many of the poorer communities were known as Irish Republicans and they tended to support in Fain, and many of them joined and supported the Irish Republican Army and felt it was a legitimate resistance to colonial repression. And their view was we couldn't wait for unification. It has to happen now and if we have to use armed resistance to get it, we will. And then on the other side, you know, you had two mainstream Unionists or Protestant political parties, the Democratic Ulster Unionist Party and the UUP Ulster Unionist Party. One was sort of more middle class, which is the UUP DUP was led by Ian Paisley, and they wanted to preserve their British identity. Protestants were British and they were going to defend it. And the working class equivalent of shin Fin and the IRA where the Loyalless paramilitary parties and their two armed wings, and they ended up killing more people than the IRA did. And I mentioned a friend of mine, David Irvine, who was a Loyalless paramilitary leader, and I remember taking them to know only the Balkans, but to Columbia to meet with the el n in the Farc and others over the years. And he really connected with him because even though he was white Protestant from Northern Ireland, he was a working class socialist as you would say. But somebody who said that we took up arms to defend a community that we thought was under threat. But he said, we went from defending our community in other words, feeling that we had to kill to live, than to living to kill. And he said something about a conflict like that takes over our psyche and our community and the narratives that you wake up a decade later and saying you know, we're living to kill. This is what we know. And so where it ended up is the Good Friday Agreement brought them together, but it didn't get to that point of resolving these underlying differences. Wow, thank you for that, Tim. Most of us. We really didn't know the details of that conflict, and I think, as Wikipedia to Tim, you did a good job of breaking that down. I want to know when you bring these leaders together, where their trust falls to him. What's the vibe of those gatherings. If it's the first gathering, it's often very tense. I'll give an example. After the signing of the day In Peace Accords, I was asked by Richard Holbrook if I could bring together in London the leaders of the three communities in Bosnia, Serb, Proat and Muslim. I mean, the Dayton Peace Accords forced a sort of peace agreement, but in many ways those communities were not done fighting each other, and there was such profound anger, and so we ended up having this gathering in London, and in the beginning we had the three communities come in and the last ones to take the seat with the leaders of Bosnia. They called themselves Republic of Serupska. They were kind of a proto fascist state, frankly, and the Bosnian Muslim leaders saw them and walked out and said, we can't sit in the same room with these war criminals. And the people who got up and went to the Bosnia Muslims and said please come back in where the Palestinian and Israeli leaders who were in the room, who were women, a South African leader and somebody from Belfast, because they immediately understood how difficult this was, and they went on their own out into the lobby and spoke with them for about forty five minutes and essentially, you know, we're allies. They said, please come in and sit in this room. We know how difficult this is. And in moments like that, you know, it's really difficult to imagine sitting in the same room with people who were involved at the cleansing or involved in killing and then in that sort of support group approach. When they're sitting there, at first they're like, how do these people from Northern Ireland are Bosnia or El Salvad or connect with my experience? And then when you hear there are stories and what they went through, then the differences start to fade away and people start to listen. And there was one moment when a man named David irv who unfortunately has passed away, who was a Protestant paramilitary leader who spent a decade in prison for terrorism, was sitting there with these Kosovo leaders at a different conference, and they were shouting and yelling and saying, how do we learn from you? What do you have to share to our experience? And one person yelled out, we had artillery reigning on Sarajevo or reigning on Mostar. You didn't have any of that. And David looked over at a former IRA commander and was the first time the two of them had met, and they said, if we had access to artillery, trust us, we would have used them on each other. We used everything we could to destroy the other side. And you could see that the boson coos of our leaders stop and begin to listen. And then somebody said, but aren't you were a terrorist? And David said, you know, terrorists have to come from somewhere, and injustice is a powerful place to come from. And what would happen it is you could see people start to pull back and listen and realize they're not here giving a history example. They're speaking and profoundly human terms in ways that resonate with their own experience and challenge. Just gave me chills with that one you've mentioned, and been a part of a lot of different gatherings of people who've been on opposite sides of issues. El Salvador, Northern Ireland, South Africa, the Bosnia of region. What outcome has surprised you the most in all of this experience? Is there one that stands out? One of my great honors of life is having met Nelson Mandelar in nineteen ninety two, and he actually served on our advisory board and I had a chance to meet him in New York and I went up to him in our brief sort of encounter, and I asked him, as you negotiate the future of your country, are you thinking about how are you going to deal with your past? And he looked at me in these said, that's exactly an issue that I've been thinking about. We've been thinking about, and he called over his aid, a woman named Barbara Masskella at the time, and I had, you know, I had this sort of I guess presumption of writing a memo and I gave it to his assistant and it laid out the question of as South Africa's negotiating this big transition, what are the models to look at? And so of course it was Argentina, Chile. What happened in Europe at the end of World War Two. But what struck me was Mandela came back to me at the end of that reception and there are all these great and the good and here was this young guy who got invited through a friend and he come up to me. He said, I'm going to follow up with you on this because this is really important. And he did. And over the years, I was able to bring people from Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle East, to South Africa when he was president and after, and he would sit there and he would say to them things like be tough on structures, be tough on institutions, but don't be huff on each other. And had a power coming from Mandela. And we tend to forget or think because Mandela became such this iconic figure that what he did is used his political and moral authority to essent create a pathway for the other side to cross and said, okay, it is up to you to cross this bridge. And I've seen less famous individuals do it in other countries. John Hume in Northern Ireland did the same thing with the IRA, meeting with them secretly in the eighties and when his own party members found out, they wanted to expel him, and he had the same view. When you describe this scene or describe his intervention and counsel to others in conflict, how do you feel in that moment when you witness that. What's going through you emotionally? What's going through at the time, me as an American who wasn't from those countries? Is it landing? Is it making the impact? Because you know, it's difficult for people to change, particularly when the change you're going through as an individual, maybe as a leader, isn't reflected in the community you're from. They're not meeting the enemy face to face, and they're in that community that reinforces legitimate grievance and anger and strategy. But there's something that happens on that human level when you recognize your enemy as human. And so to your question, I wish Mandela was alive today. I wish a number of these leaders who are still alive I can get on a plane and go and see them, to bring this home to this country, because now, as an American caught up in this moment, I'm seeing it through a different lens. I'm seeing it through a lens of like this shit is difficult, you know, I had the privilege and not appreciating it, of pushing people to sit across the table from their enemy, to make peace with her enemy, literally telling families in Bosnia and Trebenitza after that they should move back into those villages and to those homes that have been rebuilt next to families that try to kill them. And I felt like I was doing the right thing, and I was, but here at this moment, this country, it'll last few years. I'm thinking this work is difficult. I was at a safe emotional distance from that and the other thing you asked me about trust. I remember we brought leaders from Bahrain to Belfast a few years ago after the Arab Spring, and they were talking to people separately from Protestant Shenfain other political parties, and they would ask do you need trust to negotiate? And independently they will say no, if you had trust, why would you be negotiating like this. But what they say you need to build sort of a support network underneath. Recognize that you if you had trust, you wouldn't be in this moment. Yeah, yeah, you know, this conversation about trust makes me think about this concept I've heard you talk about the zone of discomfort? Can you explain what a zone of discomfort is and how do you get people through it? So one of my mentors, as a friend of mine, Josimitia at Gaeta from Guatemala, and a number of years ago he said to me, you know, it's difficult to move people from A to Z at one moment. You need to move them from sort of A to D and then D to G. And this is without knowing the science or research. Just empirically, it's very insightful because he worked and how do you bridge divides in Guatemala? How do you build trust where there was no history of trust? And what he just observed over three decades was that where people didn't know each other, where they fail the other side, you would have to bring them together where they could begin to see the other, understand the other, and predict the other's behavior. And then you have to take them through some very difficult realities that they may not accept. And he said, that's a zone of discomfort. And then you give him a landing pad as you would put it in that A to D, let them process at that and then you take them to the next level of change. So in the US, can you paint a picture of one of our zones of discomfort from one of our communities that needs to get from A to Z, but an aid to d leap is a more appropriate path to get there. Yeah. So after the election in November, you know, we have this team work and on polarization in American social divides. When seventy four million people voted for Donald Trump, ten million more than last time, a lot of people are here just wanted to not erase these people, but feel like, how do you talk with them? How do you cross that divide or bridge that when they had no excuse in voting for this man four years later? Right? And I remember as we looked into it, we recognized that there was a lot of fear in this recent election on both sides. And one thing, there's a lot of research on what they call status threat and so for a lot of people who, let's say supported Donald Trump, there's fear of the changing cultural demographic terrain of the United States. And that is rooted in human psychology because you can see that in Northern Ireland among Protestants as a demographic changes, or in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians, or in South Africa when apartheid was ending at the route that human predictive brain is trying to navigate its environment. And when things are changing in a profound way and leaders don't come along to help them navigate that, to change and update that mental model that gets set up becomes very difficult for people. What often happens is populist demagogues come along and turn legitimate fear into grievance, then gets weaponized into something else. And so when I look at this country, the reality is, and there's research in this White Christian evangelicals think of themselves as a persecuted, prosecuted community in this country, and it's very difficult for people outside that community, particularly on the left, to accept that. So what it means, I think for the left is to recognize, you know what, these are legitimate, psychological, almost biological states of mind. And you know, and on the right, I've seen people respond when we talk about status threat and they feel, well, that's collective blame. You're essentializing us, you're thinking we all feel that way. And so there are all these sort of landmines right now in the United States because we're so divided and because Donald Trump was such a personality type and was so outrageous on so many levels. It put more oxygen and fuel into that space. And so any notion of reaching across these divides is seen as compromise, is seen as selling out. And yet what experience in other countries have shown, and not just the Mandelas and many others, is you know, we have to find a way to bridge. This doesn't mean compromise. It doesn't mean it's unity for the sake of you know, everybody get along. It's about clarity. It's about being clear about what's going on, being clear at this moment, being clear of how we got to this moment as a country, but also where we want to go together in this country. One of the frustrations I've had in talking about bridging divides and outreach and empathy and understanding someone else's journey is I have perceived I'm using my words so carefully, tim but I have perceived that the folks who I'm associated with on the left have been doing a lot of that, trying to do a lot. Let's go talk to a Trump voter, Let's get inside their head, let's get inside of their psychology, Let's super humanize them and I wonder if you can take me through a zone of discomfort exercise. Maybe it's shorter that looks at things from a different perspective, because I've also heard and felt a lot of anger around Black Lives Matter it's a terrorist group. Is there a zona discomfort example that will help me and others understand this phenomena around the divide over Black Lives Matter in the US. Is there an easier question? You know? Here's the thing. Somebody asked me sort of a similar question the last month or so after what happened at the US capital, and I said, we really have to be as precise as we can with words and what we're saying. And what's really interesting in the world of sort of conflict resolution, there's a distinction that I and others make between conflict resolution and conflict transformation. To resolve a conflict, think of the Day and Peace Accords in Bosnia, or the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland, or the one that ended the Salvadoran Civil War. That's about a brutal civil war, people dying, people being killed, people disappearing. We need to end this. It's triage, and the way you achieve that is getting people across the table to in a sense, have unity for that moment of change, but it doesn't fully transform the underlying dynamics of the society. So that conflict resolution is about unity for the sake of that agreement. But conflict transformation requires clarity. How did we get here at this moment and where do we go together? Because if we're going somewhere in the future where it's going to be a democracy, a more representative democracy, a more inclusive democracy, a more shared democracy, we need to understand how we got to this moment as a nation, in a community, and in that clarity, you need to create a space for people to come together to feel like they're being heard. And it's very difficult. Take South Africa where ninety percent of the population was Black, Malaysian, other community. I mean, that was a brutal regime. But what was interesting that the African National Congress leadership, even before Mandela got out of prison, people like Albi Sachs and others would say that we came to realize that we had to understand where the African of people were coming from historically, like how did they set up a system of apartheid, what experience did they go through to justify setting up something like this. What were they afraid of? This dynamic they created and they came to realize. They said that they suffered at the cleansing and genocide in the Boer War under the British and they had no country to go back to, unlike white South Africans of a British background literally had a passport in the back pocket. So the Afrikaans had no country to go to. So they're going to fight to the very end. And the point is is that the A and C leadership in a sense went through his own to discomfort, saying, we are absolutely clear that this is about liberation and resistance, that this is a brutal dictatorship that's been dehumanizing. But what does the future look like? Are we going to share this place? Are they going to flee? Well, these people have nowhere to go to, so they're going to stay, which means we have to figure out together how we're going to live in this country and share it. And it may not be Kumbaya, everybody come together, No, it's literally uncomfortable. It is we have to share this country together, and so a shared future has to be built on a shared understanding of how we got here. And that's about clarity, and that clarity requires discomfort. It requires a discomfort like you know what I may want. And from the other side, Mandela, I mean, I'm believed that the reason why Nelson Mandela and Winnie Mandela got divorced within a year or two is they lived in two realities of apartheid South Africa. He was in prison for twenty seven years and had a lot of time to reflect. She was in the social reality of apartheid South Africa, where day in day out she could find no moment, no chance to really sit back and say, what is the nature of the struggle about and where do I want to go with this right? And I've seen this, by the way, in other settings where leaders in prison said they had to make sense of their experience to figure out where we want to go from here. And so the zone of discomfort in this country is, you know, we have to have a reckoning, but I also think we have to have a summoning. We have to summon people to something else because black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, this is our country. It's a country where what connects us is a common citizenship. But not a common participation in it. I mean, this is real, legitimate. I don't have to tell you this suffering and loss and need for healing and repair humanization of Native Americans and African Americans and other communities for a long period of time. And yet we also have other communities who either legitimately have had real loss over time or have narratives in their communities of loss. And so I think that's the point of clarity and the discomfort, and not I mean just the left and the right. Americans across also have to sit back and say this is a defining moment, this is about transformation. Otherwise we're in deep trouble. Sorry to be so pessimistic, but I do think that that is what's required at this time. And you know, I think of myself is progressive and liberal. My whole life is on social justice. But there are moments in this country in the last few years where I tell my friends, you know what, you've got to give people the capacity to change those who don't change. You start to figure out who are the people who will never change, And now you've identified them further, then there are those who are fearful of change because change is difficult, and then more than not most people want to change and they have to go through discomfort. But in recognizing that takes a discomfort because we want that certainty about what this process should look like. And that's why you say that reckoning is so important, But it's also summoning at the same time. How do we both reckon and summon Because reckon is dealing with a reality of the past and today, but summing what to the future. And I think that's that moment we're renascent nation. You've reflected a few times on bringing your work home. You've done a lot of work outside of the US, and it sounds to me like you feel a sense of urgency about what's happening in the US right now. Do you ever feel a sense that the divisions and conflicts in the US are irreconcilable? I don't. I do it at moments. There are deep divides and there's anger on all sides. I say all sides. It's not just both sides. I think we have to go through stages. You know, I was saying earlier about clarity and unity. I think it sounds good for some, but unity is actually a disservice to talk about right now. So one is clarity, the other is coexistence or dissent. Recognizing and living with difference and dissent is going to be really important because people are not going to change quickly and overnight. There are really these and transpositions. You have media platforms whose economic incentive is to drive that, and so we have to be realistic about those. And so what do we do in the interim is, I think find ways to live with difference and not of me, just cultural and demographic difference, political difference. It's okay to be dissenting, It's okay to you know, have profound disagreement because at the core democrat see is about managing difference. And I think that's what we have to do here, is to say it's not an irreconcirable why, because what's the alternative? It is find ways to live with difference, to manage that, and find ways to reconnect and to see how much we have in common, and then together figure ways to define a country that reflects the reality of what we are and where we're going in a positive direction. After the break, we fast forward to this current moment we're living through and dig deep into beyond conflicts US based work to understand how we can apply the lessons they've learned abroad, plus our in studio virtual audience talks with Tim about ways we can counter conflict and extremism in our communities. So, Tim, you and Beyond Conflicts work has historically centered on these facilitating these in person cross party dialogues. Over time, you've then layered in a lot more behavioral science and neuroscience to understand what drives division in the first place. What does science and research taught us about social conflict? What did they taught you? You know, this year is the thirtieth the anniversary of Beyond Conflict, And for the first twenty twenty five years, we would go into countries that we're trying to imagine how do you go from dictatorship to democracy or from conflict to peace? And so having done that for a number of years, we saw some successes, but we were also coming up against a lot of intractable conflicts and a lot of fragile peace agreements. And the question that I and my colleagues ast is what are we missing about the human experience? What are we missing about the struggles that people go through? That Guatemala and friend of mine, and a mentor said to me, you know, exclusion is the main driver of conflict. And I was like, okay, how does that play out in the human brain and our cognition, in our emotion. Because if we understand that better, could we actually be more effective in framing strategies, interventions and ways to advance real transformative change in peace. And that's why we started looking at brain and behavioral science. And I'll just maybe quickly and there by saying, Jerry Adams was one. He was president of Shenfein, which is the political party associated with the IRA. Though he won't admit it publicly, he was one of the top IRA leaders. And I had him come to a course I was teaching at a university here a few years ago, and a student sat across the table and said, how do you make peace with somebody you may have tried to kill or they may have killed somebody very close to you? And he paused, and he said, in a very thick Belfast accent, he said, it's tough to make peace with a humiliated partner. And there was a retired neuroscientist sitting in the room who had been observing the class. Nick up and he said, you know, I've heard Adams talk about humiliation. I heard somebody from the Middle East talk about fear and empathy and what it is to be a victim and things that are sacred. He said, you know, there's a lot of brain science research behind that, And I said, what do you mean brain science because I knew from either social psychology, what I observed, what I experienced growing up, and I thought, tell me more. And the key thing he said that got me on this path, he said, well he was intosemities at this point. He said, speaking as a scientist, we are not rational beings with emotions. In fact, we're just the opposite. We're emotionally based beings who can only think rationally when we feel that our identities as we see them, not you or other as we see them, are understood and valued by others. Once we feel understood, he said, there's a deep psychological, almost biological necessity to feel understood. Then literally we can begin to engage rationally with others. And that's what put me on the journey to look at this. Yeah, that's powerful, man, It's just this like a prerequisite. You know, there's an emotional safety, emotional acknowledgement. Psychological acknowledgement prerequisite before you can enter some of these higher levels. So in terms of were you able to look back at some of your previous interventions that maybe didn't stick you talk about these kind of fragile peace agreements, was that, in hindsight a clearly missing element the emotional side, the neurological side. You know, it was clear that these emotions were playing an outsize role in making peace and reconciliation possible, like intractable conflict. In the last negotiations with the PLO underrs R Fat, when Bill Clinton and Madeline Albright were trying to negotiate the Camp David Accords, it collapsed at the last minute, and the two most difficult issues were the writer of Palestinian refugees to return and the future of Jerusalem as a sacred city for Jews, Muslims, and Christians. And years later I found that there's research coming out of brain and behavioral science that those things that we hold sacred choice and not mean just religious terms, but things that have a profound, almost sacred importance to us a process in a different region of the brain than utilitarian decisions we make. And there's even neuroimaging that is confirmed that this gets processed differently and is in a sense more entrenched cognitively in the brain when people are still being forced to compromise things that are above compromise, And the research found is a simple but powerful gesture of symbolic concession. I understand how a sacred this is to you, I understand how important this is to you. Actually creates a cognitive shift where people feel like, now I'm being understood. And it goes back to what the scientists said a few years earlier about Jerry Adams comment, we have a deep need to feel understood if we're able to navigate the world and connect with others. That is profound. And you've anticipated where I might have gone with that, which is does that mean you then need to fully concede to their perspective or that sacred, deeply held belief if that's an athema to your own. But you use the phrase symbolic concession that we need to feel understood, even if we're not completely fully understood. That kind of opens the doorway and I interpreting, Yeah, I mean, that's why understanding science is not to make it more complex, but to decomplexify it in a sense if there's such a phrase, And that is what we all know without understanding all the structures of the brain, is we need to feel understood. We relax, our stress levels go down. And by the way, there's research that affirms that, and we can begin to think about hearing others. But it doesn't mean, to your point that I have to accept and endorse your point of view. It just means I understand what this means for you. And Bill Clinton, I had reached out to him but a year ago for this work we were doing on status threaten and identity threat United States. I said, it's become really existential threat in this country right now. How do we navigate this when fear of change, demographic, economic has been weaponized and let's be honest, particularly by the right, for decades. Now, how do we deal with this? And he said that when he was running for governor of Arkansas in the early eighties, he would always ask himself, how do I get on the right side of fear? How do I acknowledge it? How do I have people feel like, oh, somebody's understanding me without validating it. It's like I hear you now let's move in this direction. Yeah, and that's what we need to do. Understand doesn't necessarily mean agree with Bingo, which is a relief now I know you and Beyond Conflict have been doing deeper work recently looking at how Democrats and Republicans, for example, misperceive one another and their viewpoints. Can you walk me through those studies and what you're finding there? Sure? So leaders from other countries that I had worked with, from South Africa or Central America, the Middle East, Northern Ireland, they had been telling me for fully a decade beforehand, Oh, you need to work in your own country. They like canaries in a coal mine, could sense were things were going, and they would know, you know, they've been through it, and they would know, you know, they know how to navigate these environments, and they pick it up in the ether, like, oh, that language is really unhealthy. There are real problems emerging back home. And they were picking it up when Barack Obama became president in two thousand and eight. And so what we did was we now had this relationship with researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and other schools, and we said, Okay, with some funding, let's understand how polarization is being shaped at this moment and what can we do about it. And so that report you mentioned, we called America's Divide in Mind, done by my colleague and Mel Bruneau, who you met a few years ago, who unfortunately passed away from cancer and he's deeply missed. We looked at how polarization is being shaped psychologically and what we found it was becoming more identity based. When that happens, a whole range of unconscious psychological processes come online that only serve to drive us further apart. And when you say identity based as opposed to idea based, right, So you and I could have a strong disagreement about a policy, or we could have a strong disagreement about each other's value or validity or humanity. Is that the distinction? Yeah, I mean in the nineteen fifties, I had to dig up and reading over the last few years a lot of political science about polarization, and political scientists in the United States said that the United States was not polarized enough because the Republican and Democratic parties were bigger tents and there were fewer choices for Americans of different political interests. Or persuasions to vote, unlike the UK or other countries that had broader political structures and therefore with more polarization, like a local election as a polarization process. Right, because you're people from different science competing. That's natural and healthy. But when it becomes the way it's become in this country, where all these other distinctions class, race, culture, geography get aligned under Democratic or Reublican. More white Christian evangelicals are under the Republican, more people of color, professionals, educated, urban or under Democrats. I mean, you can see a whole series of how these new alignments have happened. Yeah, then it takes on an identity piece, and it goes from where citizens quote unquote of a nation maybe with profound disagreements and we don't really feel this democracy maybe fully works for all of us, but when it becomes an us versus them, then you are profound threat to my community and identity. The good news is that we did these surveys nationally and we would ask representative democrats a Republicans, So, a Democrat, where are you on immigration and open borders? Well, we need immigration reform, but we need a process that works and allows people in but a lot of Democrats were in the middle. Republicans we need stronger restrictions, but a lot we're in the middle. But if it has a Democrat, where do you think the Republicans are? On immigration? They want the borders completely closed. Republican what do you think the Democrats are? They want them completely open? Right, So on big issue of the big issue, and on how much you think the other side dislikes you, and even more concerning the humanizes you, it's up near fifty percent. So we sat back and said, wait a minute. A huge chunk of the country, probably close to fifty percent, are overestimating by fifty percent how far apart they are. And all that does is further drive this tribal polarisition. And perception is reality. So if I believe that, I'm going to behave based on that. So what happens when you tell people, actually, you're not as far apart as you thought. What comes of that? So we actually in the last year and a half, we hired a filmmaker. I said, let's create a short video, take the research on these misperceptions, and get representative Trump and Biden supporters ask them the same question and capturing your response. It was like a holies moment, like you're kidding, but where am I getting at my information? Or what about this? What about that? That video? We then tested and then Stanford tested and a big Strengthening Democracy Challenge a few months ago with thirty two thousand people out of two hundred and fifty interventions. It was rated number one for reducing support for political violence in the United States and partisan animosity because it corrected these misperceptions and Americans do not get information that says, you know what, Yes, we are divided, we have some profound issues to address, but there's much more overlap. And when people know that, and I've seen this in other countries, it's what makes peace possible and deeply divided places that you have allies that you may have never imagined. How much did the propensity toward political violence decrease? How did you measure that? We followed up I think it was every quarter and asking certain questions to see does this change your view about the use of political violence? A warmth thermometer in terms of how warm you feel, do you feel like a greater sense of being understood and so forth and so on, And what we found is that all of these measures improved because people sat back and said, you're not asking me to compromise. You're not giving me a symbolic concession. You're not saying that I could potentially betray my tribe by saying, well, I have something in calm with you, because there are all these cognitive not just explicit, but implicit forces that are telling us don't do this. But this is simple, it's neutral. It's saying, wait a minute, you have more in common than you ever imagined. And think of that in a family situation. Yeah, if you thought a colleague or a friend really disliked you and then you found out No, it's just the opposite. How does it make you feel emotionally? Relief? Relief? Yeah. Also, I need to get my hands on that video and plug it into the TikTok algorithm for everybody. No, please ject the Fox News airwaves and make sure that those viewers it's if it's the number one out of two hundred and fifty interventions. We need to scale that. And I would love to fall up with you. Not because we even did research on misperceptions around democratic norms. Yeah, now I will say that after January sixth and Donald Trump I assumed that Republicans had decreased their support for democratic norms and principles. Our recent research with colleagues in Chicago found that Democrats Republicans still today equally value democratic norms and principles, but if they think the other side doesn't, they're willing to violate them. And it's the same fifty percent gap. So getting these out at scale is what we're now looking at doing. Well, when I hear the rhetoric of the people trying to protect the election and showing up with guns, they're verbalized rationalies, well, because the Democrats are going to steal it and go so because they're going to violate the norm, that gives me an excuse to violate the norm. And then Democrats see that like, well they're violating the norms, so we got to So it becomes this escalation. I know that you are also working on a more current intervention and process. Where do we go from here? You're calling it? Tell us about that? Sure? So you know, I mentioned that our sort of traditional historic work in other countries was bringing together former enemies across profound divides at different levels. Yeah, but then I realized on a personal level, for the last five or six years when things started to go off the rill here in my country, our country and has a different emotional residence. It's like, wow, my history, my identities, my narratives, my family members who GUY can talk to, not talk to, and it's very different. And I realized I was at a profound safe distance. So over the last year I reached out to a lot of these friends and I said, I need to bring you now to my country the way we would go to these other countries. We need to bring it to this country, and not just in Washington, but across the country to meet with people across divide, whether it be community activists, bridge builders, local elected officials, megachurches, small synagogues, because there are a few Americans who have the direct experience of navigating such a profound crisis in their own country. And we also lack a historical memory, you know. I talk with my partner Elizabeth about this a fair amount. As the World War two generation, you know, leaves us, we are collectively losing a direct connection to the worst versions of some of this division and the scale of political violence like taken to the maximum and to the extreme. So we have a temporal gap to chatti clothes, but also into your point spatial when you can bring people who've been through it, who know the worst of this and also the healing that's possible on the other side, bring them home here to your territory. What does that look like him how are they received? So in June we took this most recent report and I brought Rolfmeyer, who was the key negotiator and the talk Stand Apartheid. So this is a man who grew up as a white afrikana who thought that apartheid was normally good for whites but for blacks early in his career shocking, but that was the mental model of the world he had. He then went through a process of recognizing this system is corrupt and I need to do what I can to end it. So he became the chief negotiator in the talk Stand Apartheid, and he said, I came to realize over a period of years, not only the corruption of apartheid, but what was in the mindset of my community to even set this system up. So we went to Washington and met with some of the key congressional leaders on the Democratic side, because we tried to get some Republican but not at that time interested and we met with key congressional leaders and they were old enough to know the role that Rolfe played. But talking about identity threats, social standards threat in this country. It had a huge impact on the members of Congress in the meeting and the question was where do we go from here? And Rolfe and I were talking afterwards and country after country and even Monica McWilliams, who founded the Women's Coalition in Northern Ireland said we all got to the point said there needs to be a better way. And that's when these leaders and other countries, and we are often involved but not the only ones, would go to these other countries and come back and say, wow, if they can do it, we can do it because this is a shared human challenge of how do you sit across the table from your enemy? Can you forgive? And we need it here so I want to shift us into bring it in some of the questions that people submitted, we've got Mark texted, are you trying to seek middle ground with those who may view the world differently than you or is your goal only really reached when they have one hundred percent bought into your political viewpoints. We can't expect nor do we need to convince everybody of somebody's point of view what you need to do. And it's country after country. Most people are not political A democratic Republican and I'm aggressive of a mega supporter. They think about what am I going to do today for my family, my work and all these things that are in front of me, and yet they care about it takes many of them, not all, and that's where the vast majority are and they just want the system to work. Yeah, so we don't have to win everybody over. We just have to win enough people over to say we live in a diverse country. We live in a multiracial nation which is not fully a multiracial democracy. And the only way we're going to address these shared problems is finding what we have a shared problems today to address, because our research shows that Americans have far more common than they imagine, and how do we build off that with all people feeling that they have to give up their core identities or interest Thank you, We're going to continue this conversation. We have some live questioners queued up. Damon Williams Europe first, and go ahead and state your question. I'm Damian Williams from Memphis, Tennessee. And you've kind of touched on it already. But what I was really wondering, you know, what it looks like is just different world perspectives. And I've seen it, and I've had in my own experience where two people will look at the same thing and literally see two different things. So how do you have some kind of reconciliation with someone who's experiencing a completely different reality. One of the simplest and best interventions I've learned from my colleagues in the science is context. Is that our brains have alved to be predictive. We're constantly trying to predict our social and physical environment. And if we don't know or have experienced the lived experience of others, we can access it through context. Oh, I know what that feels like in my community. I know what that feels like in my experience. So how do you contextualize something. I'll give you a concrete example, and it may not completely connect to your point, but I think it's related. So there was a statue of Abraham Lincoln in Boston that was a replica of the one in DC that was built about a decade after his assassination and he was standing on a pedestal with two freed slaves looking up to him, unshackled. Even at the revealing of this in Washington, Frederick Douglas said, this is inappropriate, it's dehumanizing. So two years ago the city of Boston decided to take a down and a friend of mine went to college with whose Irish American called me up and he's sort of centator. A conservative said, is Abraham Lincoln now being canceled? And what I said to him is, you know, Bob, imagine if there was a statue of Queen Victoria or Oliver Cromwell and Boston. Before I could finish, he said, take that statue down. It connected to his lived experience because there are these narratives in the Irish American immigrant community of the famine and what Queen Victoria did and what Oliver Cromwell had done earlier. The notion of a statue representing those two is so ibhortant that he all of a sudden contextualized. Well, I guess I can understand now what that would mean for someone who's African American. And from a research point of view, a simple intervention like that, and they've followed up can last a lifetime. That's fascinating. Oh, I want to follow up on everything, but we have so many more in the que I want to give keep the passing the Mike, Allison Mousqueta, please go ahead and state your question. Thanks. Hi, I'm Alison Musqueta. I am here in Denver, Colorado, and I work in public health across the entire state of Colorado and lots of different communities that all have very unique their own cultures, their own belief systems, lots of political differences, and I work in a program where we all have the similar goal, but we have a lot of different ideas about how to get there. And I really find that one way to do that is similar to what I think you've been saying, is find those foundations of what we all agree upon as the basis of the conversation and build from there. And it's taking me, as a young professional, long time to learn these skills. I was never taught these things. So I was just really thinking about my two young children and concern for them, like, how do we teach young kids and young people to prepare them to be in a world where these kinds of conversations are going to be really critical and importance and have this healthy level of conflict when what they see role modeled around us right now is not that. What many of the South Africans, for example, would tell people in other countries is process before substance in a deeply divided setting, to go to the issues that divide people as a recipe for disaster, because then people don't listen. And it's not just from a political or an explicit it's as much as psychological mindset. I don't know you, I don't trust you, Why should I trust you? And the process piece to me the common ground that we need to lay whether it's in a family or school or other settings. And we've been trying this, by the way, with some of these different groups over the last few years, is laying out these processes. Let's talk about how our brain navigates the world. Let's talk about common experiences we have and what it feels like to be marginalized, humiliated. You know, what is it to feel human fragility? What is it to feel privileged? Do you feel privilege? And so we take out the sort of precursor white fragility, white privilege, because I think it in the context of Northern Ireland. If the Catholics said, of the Protestants, what we need to do is talk first about your Unionist or Protestant fragility or privilege, those conversations would have gone nowhere because you've already had this deep identity based conflict where those identity markers play a much more salient important role than core political and economic interest. I mean, it's very clear if that book that came out several years ago, what's the matter of the Kansas is people will always, you know, they say it an organization's culture, Trump's process. Well, culture and identity will trump everything because that's what's deeply sort of ingrained in our evolution is how we navigate the world is on these identity markers. And so if we could think about organizing conversations and a more neutral human center term as opposed to a Democrat, Republican, liberal, conservative, Catholic Protestant, what is it that we all share? I want children's videos of the things that you've already launched into the world. And well, i'll just flag this now. I think there will be tension between speaking truth and being effective in your linguistic approach to preserve an open door, right, And so if we're just going to talk vaguely about privilege and that save white privilege or supremacy, and that save white supremacy, what's the trade off in terms of completeness versus openness that the other would even have to entering that conversation, Bartune, I agree with you totally about privilege. The thought is, how do you have a conversation about the nature of privilege and then say so in this context, could you feel privileged by the color of your skin? As opposed to not even going there. It's to be able to have people think about, all right, I've already sent in the conversation of privilege in my brain, right, and I'm already gendering in my mind, oh I know, or I don't feel privileged, but could you feel privileged here? And then you're creating a cognitive pathway for people to engage something. You're walking them up to it rather than slamming them. Yeah, you're walking them up to it as opposed to the way I learned how to swim. Whether it just threw me in the deep end and say do you know how to swim? I'm like, I guess I do now if I want to live thanks to each All right, Mary Pearl coming on line and go ahead and state your question. Thought. Well, my name is Mary Pearl. I'm dog sitting at my brother's house on Cape Cod and I'm hearing that Tim thinks we have to start where we are today to have these conversations. But I just have to ask it. Don't we have to have a reckoning with our history of systemic racism and violence and indigenous slaughter. It's used me. There's a deep, psychological, strong connection between white supremacy and hatred of Indigenous people from our past that just infuse our presence. So how can we get to a new place of respect and understanding if we can acknowledge the history? Yeah, I mean that is such a key question here, and it's a key question pretty much every country worked in in the past, and they're also often very divided and difficult and never completely resolved. My personal view is that it's very difficult to talk about reconciling of people until you reconcile a history. And the question is how do you do that in such a way that it advances real change? And I think you have to break it down as one is to acknowledge what has happened, and what are the ways in which you can do it actually is meaningful to the communities that need that history acknowledged, and what is the repair today for their descendants and the legacy of four centuries of blatant to humanization to people of color in this country. I mean Native Americans in particular and African Americans. So those are absolutely essential. The question then becomes, how do you move those forward in a country that's deeply not just divided politically, but with the recognition of what happened to Native Americans and African Americans who are brought here, is all these other immigrant communities Asians, Latinos, Muslims and others who have had Irish American, Italian American when they come over, we're really dehumanized, and they have these narratives in their families. And so what I've been doing for the last couple of years is reaching out to the people who led these truth commissions in many countries around the world and say, what can we bring to this moment in the United States, How do we stage this, how do we do in such a way that it can really be a process of healing and transformation. Yeah, I have a little trick I learned on this one, Mary, and I think the history can be a real third rail and to tim earlier point, context matters, and so how you walk people up to it. And because I end up talking to a lot of white people, I'm the white people whisperer in terms of race conversations. Sometimes I try to I tell a personal story of my own emotional challenge with accepting the painful history right in my own family history, with the heroic figure, you know, my mother, who a lot of people know of, and I'm like, yes, but also there were these other things about her and they created challenges for me. And there's a longer version of it, but essentially, like I hook them in with the mom was fallible story and tell my journey of healing on the other side of that, and how I actually have a deeper knowledge of my mother through this acknowledgment and thus a deeper love. And that's what I want for us in the country. And so it's entering through a point not of lecture and shame positioning, but rather confession. Really first, here's my experience, Here's how hard it hurt. Here's what I found on the other side. I want you to have that same transformation, that same journey, that same taste of freedom, and for the people who've had direct access to that's a much more welcome pathway into a real hard conversation than your daddy owned slaves. You are a white supremosies, you know, like it just doesn't quite do the same thing. Yeah, Can I add one quick thing bartunity? And that is the challenge we have in this country is that the truth commissions that emerged, the Truth and Reconciliation commissions from Argentina and Chile and then picked up by South Africa, we're mostly state run dictatorships. And then they had a lot of people supporting it, but they were institutionalized, legally set up state dictatorships. What we're seeing from Northern Ireland to the United States is mostly there are elements of the state and history in states who still today do things that are horrific. But it's a lot of civilian civilian if you know what I'm saying, right, and so nobody has quite figured out what is the process in a deeply divided community that is hyperpolarized to come to terms with this, and people would go to the model in South Africa, and the South Africans went to Argentina and Chile. And the benefit of that is Afrikaans and white people could say, ah, it was the system, yeah, right, or in Argentina Chile it was the military dictatorship here right, people's yeah. That's what I struggle with because of the identity based nature of our divisions, it makes it so much more difficult. So I agree it needs to be done, but let's figure out a way to do it with the tools we have to make it meaningful and transformative. Andrea, we are about to call on you. I don't know if it's Andrea or Andrea you will let us know. Go ahead and state the question that you have. I'm Andrea. I'm from Washington State, and I was just wondering when you have two people who when you're in a conversation with somebody where the conversation is becoming not useful anymore, what kind of linguistic tactics do you have to get the conversation going in a positive direction. I've struggled with this, and it was more difficult because it's my own people I know and so forth. But here's what I've tested and learned more anecdotably, when somebody said to me recently that the twenty twenty election was stolen, that Joe Biden is illegitimate, and that Donald Trump is the best president we've ever had. Rather than getting angry and outrage and get into the issues, I said, well, I can maybe understand why you feel that way. And what it did was I could see there was like a change in this person's countenance. What he was expecting was me to come back in an aggressive way. I said, I can understand why you feel that way. What I didn't say was I agree with you. You're wrong. Don't you realize what he stand for? Don't you realize what happened? And what it forced him to do was a bit of cognitive dissidents to rethink, so, huh, what does this mean? And I could see it going on. And I had the benefit of speaking to some brilliant social psychologists ahead of times, saying I want to try this, and they said it creates cognitive dissidents because people come in with an expectation that you're going to act and speak in a certain way. And then I didn't want to then at that point, because I knew I would see this person continue on the conversation. I wanted him to sit with I understand you. I mean it's almost like if you're keeping them engaged, they're not storm in a capital, right, And so if that's the energy you have, and again Tim said this already, that's not everybody's job. But if you find yourself in that situation and you want to try it, I think it can be worth a shot. You also can't change most of us are not in a a position to change in one's mind if we don't have a relationship with them. And so preserving the link is also preserving the opportunity to move people across that link and to be moved, you know, into some degree. But if we just have a counter energy and a severing of relationship, then we're severing one of the pillars of how a citizen, which is to invest in relationships, and we're sort of we're losing an opportunity to potentially persuade or change or shift that may come later. We got one more live question, Deborah Scheka. My name is Deborah and I am in Reno, Nevada. So my question is this. I've been thinking about how polar and I've been divided our country is and it troubles me deeply, and so what can I do? You know, I call a service center and I talk to a customer service agent and I try to be extra nice ideal with people in the grocery store and try to be extra nice. And that's the only thing I've been able to come up with. And it's kind of a nice thing to do, but it feels like it's not enough. What else can we do? Or is being extra nice to everyone we encounter that meet our standards as well? Is that going to going to give points for that? You know, I think we have to pick and choose on an individual level those relationships that we want to invest in. It could be a family member, it could be a coworker. There could be somebody that you know you have profound disagreement, but they will be in your life in some way, and you want a decent relationship. On a broader scale. What I've seen and recommend is be engaged citizens, you know, step out of your silos, look for those moments where you can actually do something that crosses divides. I mean, if there's one lesson that all these leaders from profound divides in other countries who have been through the ship to put up bluntly say is you've got to find ways to live together and cooperate because the alternative is really bad. The other thing is norms play an outsize role in shaping behavior. Research showed in behavioral science that actually focusing on hearts and minds has very little impact on behavior as much as norms do. In fact, people's hearts and minds will follow to shape to their new norm. And think of those leaders and institutions that we want to elevate, whether it be a Republican, a Democrat, and independent or cultural figures who have the capacity to shape new norms. When I think of John McCain in two thousand and eight, when that woman came up and said candidate Barack Obama was on an American What did John McCain do. He took the microphone and said, no, I'm sorry, miss, that's incorrect, that's wrong. That has a big influence. We need to be finding people, but take me on the Republican side, who are willing to step up and do the right thing. And I think that can shape an environment that can begin to bring the temperature down. Because one thing we see, and again I've seen this in other countries. People don't like to live their lives with this much toxics city in the environment. And you know, there are some who benefit from it, some who find it very entertaining and energizing, but the vast for joining Yeah, not the most, but not the most, but not most of us. And I think that's that's a good common ground to re establish them. We can all agree, even if we don't share it a factual reality, we share that emotional exhaustion reality, and that is a possible bridge as well. Gun stim We got to talk about guns. I think the context for increasing language around dehumanization and anti democratic norms and openness to political violence. It hits differently in the US because we have so many guns per capita here and so the fears of violence are justified in ways that they might not be in other places with just a lot of newspapers talking a lot of smack. Do you have any research experience focus on the special relationship that we have with guns in the US and the unique challenges that creates for reversing this spiraling, escalating threat. And it's horrendous to see the amount of guns and the gun culture we have in this country. You know, I mentioned earlier that things that we hold to be sacred to us a process in the different part of the brain than other utilitarian calculations. So I wrote a piece after Sandy Hook, six months eight months after Sandy Hook, looking at sacred values and gun control and recognize that after seeing a failure of gun legislation after Sandy Hook, it actually got worse. What are we missing? Is there a different way to frame the protection of children and a different way to frame a conversation with those gun odors who really think it's like a sacred value. And I'll be happy to share that and you can link it. But that got a lot of interest and the answer, you know, I don't know the answer, my friend. And yeah, it's deeply embedded. You know. I said to somebody, we never demobilize as a nation from the American revolutions. Wow, And that no of militias and the right to be our arms has never been reformed and changed. Yeah. We ask all of our guests, how do you define citizen if you interpret it as we do as a verb, What does it mean to citizen to you tim, to engage, to know what's happening around you, to show the concern about your family, your community, your colleagues, and the country you live in. Because there are a lot of well educated people that I know, and when I ask them about the state of affairs, they're clueless. And it's not because they're stupid. They don't know. And I think it's a requirement to understand the world you live in, particularly at this moment in time. Tim Phillips, thank you for helping us see the possibilities of a world beyond conflict and spending this time with us. Thank you, Thank everybody. It's hard to feel fully satisfied after a conversation like this. The kind of intractable disagreement, dehumanization, distrust, and disinformation we're up against. It's just overwhelming and a problem. This complex doesn't have a simple solution. Tim and Beyond Conflict have contributed to a constellation of approaches and insights that we can interpret and try to use in our own communities. And they've also reminded us that comforting or not, the United States is not the first country to live through intense division, and we're definitely not the first to believe that moving beyond it is impossible. I remain most heartened by Beyond Conflicts research which shows that we're not as far apart as we think we are. Basically, what I think Republicans think of me is far worse than what they actually think of me, and vice versa. That's important. But as far as the tactics that we use to reconnect to each other, I think tim and Beyond conflict they get us part of the way there. So this is the first of two episodes we have addressing this division at the heart of our democratic culture. I'm thinking of Adrian Marie Brown right now and this thing she said about conflict. We don't actually need to try always to get beyond conflict. Instead, we need to try to engage in generative conflict so that the disagreements we have and we're gonna always have them, don't destroy the prospect of an us and the prospect of this beautiful experiment we're in together. Time for some actions. First, one internally, reflect Think about a recent time where you strongly disagreed with someone about a political or ideological issue, whether it was online or in person, Notice where you felt that in your body. Did you feel pressure across your forehead, tension in your jaw, tightness in your stomach or chest. These are survival responses. Your brain and body are telling each other that you are in danger. The next time you're in a situation like this, try the ninety second rule created by Harvard researcher doctor Joe Bolte Taylor. She found that it takes ninety seconds for an emotion to pass, So before jumping back into a debate that's getting your blood boiling, take ninety seconds to step out of the room or away from your phone, Breathe, pace around, hold, plank, position, whatever it takes to give you that time to move out of this understandable fight flight freeze response to an ability to better understand yourself and others. The more we practice this, the more we'll be able to recognize and reduce our own fear and threat responses towards people we disagree with. Next up, become more informed. We've got stuff for you to watch, read, and listen to. With tickling all the senses, check out America's Divided Mind Beyond Conflicts short video that shows Americans aren't as far apart as we think, and if you want to take a deep dive into their research, we've linked some of Beyond Conflicts reports on the psychology that drives us apart, and on renewing democracy. But if reading or watching aren't your thing, Tim recommends listening to an interview with South African leaders on how America can move beyond toxic polarization. You'll find all of these resources linked in our show notes. Finally, let's publicly participate. Bridging the political tension in our country and in our communities won't resolve itself on its own, and if you've got the bandwidth, take time to move conversations offline and invest in building real relationships with people across the aisle in your community. And you don't need to do it alone either. Check out organizations creating opportunities for Americans to come together and navigate our divides at the local level, groups like One America Movement, Civic Genius, Make America Dinner Again, or Living Room Conversations. Find links to all these groups in the show notes. If you take any of these actions, please brag about it online and use the hashtag how to citizen. Also tag our Instagram how to citizen. I am always online and I really do see your messages, so send them. You can also visit our website how a Citizen dot Com, which has all of our shows full transcripts, actions, and more. Finally, see this episode show notes for resources, actions and more. Ways to Connect a Citizen with barrettun Day is a production of iHeartRadio Podcasts and row Home Productions. Our executive producers are Me, barrettun Day, Thurston and Elizabeth Stewart. Our lead producer is Ali Graham, Our associate producer is Donia abdel Hamid. Alex Lewis is our managing producer, and John Myers is our executive editor. Our mix engineer is Justin Berger. Special thanks to dust Light Productions, who arranged my first interview with Tim. Original music by Andrew Eapen with additional music by Blue Dot Sessions, and our audience engagement fellows are Jasmine Lewis and Gabbie Rodriguez. Special thanks to Joel Smith from iHeartRadio and Lay Labina. Next time on How the Citizen. Tim gave us insight into how deep seated the discord and hatred of our political division has grown. But a lot of us are at a loss when it comes to figuring out our role and de escalating it. And while sitting down and trying to talk things out will work for some of us, in order to rebuild relationships with those we deeply disagree with, we've got to get created. And she said, people are so deeply in their camps and there's there's so much distrust that I think we need to remember why we enjoyed each other in the first place. And so she threw a parking lot party, and she convinced her board to rent a dunk tank, and the core of the parking lot party was dunk the deacon, Yes, right, and we can all come together around that. Author and facilitator Prey A. Parker on the art of gathering and the inventive ways we can practice being in community across differences. Row home Productions