Mónica Guzmán

After the election in 2016, I found a foolproof way to stop conversation.

I would tell groups of my fellow Seattle liberals that my parents, who I love to death and see every weekend, are not just Mexican immigrants like me.

They're Mexican immigrants who voted for Donald Trump.

I would share this at networking events, random get-togethers.

Whenever politics came up and people started giving voice to that sense that anyone who voted for someone they think is a monster must be monsters themselves.

I did this so often, it became a kind of game.

Not to make anyone uncomfortable, I realized, but to put my circle to the test.

I've had umpteen conversations with my parents about politics.

I know their reasons, and they know mine.

So after the beats of silence at these get-togethers, as people considered what they knew about the man in the White House, the rhetoric against Mexicans, and this crazy thing I just said about two Mexicans I know who voted for him, I'd wait.

I'd wait to see if instead of changing the subject or walking away,

if someone would turn to me and ask, why?

I'm Monica Guzman.

I'm the author of I Never Thought of It That Way, How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times, and the Senior Fellow for Public Practice at Braver Angels, the nation's largest cross-partisan grassroots organization dedicated to depolarizing America.

The one that always comes to mind is my parents.

I'm part of a politically divided family and my parents and I are Mexican immigrants.

They voted for Trump both times, fairly enthusiastically, and I voted for Clinton and Biden.

Even before that, we've just had a lifetime of dinner table conversations that have thrown out, you know, Glenn Beck quotes and all kinds of debates about whatever was going on.

even back in the Clinton days, all kinds of yelling and trying to understand each other.

The kind of conversation that really tipped it for me was when I was in Seattle in 2015, 2016, and 2017, as those conversations about politics got more and more tense in a very blue city.

And what I'm hearing is,

A lot of people have a lot of judgments when there haven't actually been that many conversations with the people they're judging.

And as a journalist who tries to help people understand each other, that just felt like, hang on, gotta pull back and figure out what's going on here.

I think there's lots of reasons, but the one that comes to mind is we're so divided, we're blinded.

When you look at the research, it shows that when people are asked to look across the divide and guess at the views on that side, we are constantly exaggerating.

And this happens from both sides.

And we're constantly over-vilifying.

We're seeing a lot of malevolence when it isn't quite there.

We're stretching it beyond reality.

And

We really care about getting things right.

We care about facts, we care about truth, but we're not seeing the truth of other people.

And that's because of the depth and complexity and layers of polarization and toxic polarization in our society.

It's the kinds of signals and narratives that we receive

It's the animosity and the high volume of these things.

And it's also, I think, very importantly, how much our relationships across difference have frayed, very naturally and organically, one burned bridge and one burned relationship at a time.

Every time we decide we can't talk about politics, that's one more place of friction between difference that goes away.

But when we don't do it,

We're seeing the world as a projection instead of what it really is.

We're seeing people's perspectives as something they're not.

Yeah, exactly.

I make the distinction between puzzles and mysteries, which I borrow from author Ian Leslie, who did this really well.

But puzzles are something that feels like you have the shape, you just need to look for the missing pieces.

That's what understanding a puzzle is all about.

You can solve it.

And then a mystery just doesn't work that way at all.

You have no idea if you have the right shape, the right box, the right size.

It's not a matter of finding pieces.

It's a matter of everything you learn sort of opens up new questions.

And when we stereotype or when we flatten or when we become too certain about other people, we're treating people like puzzles.

Oh, I already know because they are X, Y, and Z. They hold this identity and this ideology.

I already know why they believe these things.

All I need to understand is this part.

And I'm going to come up and demand that answer from them.

But that's not how human beings work.

In fact, that's one of the most beautiful things about us is we are extraordinarily deep mysteries.

To try to understand a mystery from a distance is sort of the tragedy of the moment, right?

Where we think, well, it's a lot more comfortable to read a thought piece with some statistics and then make some conclusions about a group of people.

And we want to do that because it is so stressful to stay in some kinds of uncertainty.

It's stressful not to know.

We have that need for closure.

We want certainty.

But certainty is the arch villain of curiosity.

And the conclusions kill all these questions.

We end up too rigid and so divided.

That's right.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, that's a big piece of what's going on now.

Politics a few decades ago didn't feel quite so morally imperative, right?

It felt a little more like, oh, these are disagreements about policy and ideology.

And yes, there are some really high stakes issues here and there.

Nowadays, in part because our identities have stacked so neatly into these large two piles, there's others, right?

There's people in the

big two piles where you can kind of predict just by people's traits where they're likely to fall on that divide.

It's made it so much more personal.

Politics is so personal, right?

Where your candidate loses, it's not just that candidate, it's not just that race, you lose.

You're losing your country.

It feels horrible.

And that makes all of this so much harder.

So the reason that persuasion is not something that I recommend leaning into when you're having these conversations across disagreement, it's for a few things.

One, it doesn't work.

We're living at a time that's very on demand.

And one of the ways that that's infected our conversations is we tend to think, all right, I'm gonna have this conversation with my uncle and I expect to change his mind.

Why?

Well, because here's this glittering, beautiful reason that I'm holding in my hand for why I believe what I believe.

And it's awesome.

And when I understood it, it did everything to me.

And all I need to do is hand it over to him.

If I just hand it to him, it will have the same impact on him.

and then when it doesn't have the same impact on him we're infuriated and we begin to repeat ourselves except louder and louder and louder right we forget that people have these roots that go down through the years of their lives that their opinions are not just something they put on like a shirt it's it's something they've kind of grown into right and so it's really really hard to talk somebody out of something in the course of a conversation if you do influence their perspective

More than likely, it will be at a moment when they feel heard by you, where they feel connected to you, where they feel understood by you or like you're making the effort.

In order for that to quote unquote work, you can't be trying to change them.

Because changing people, trying to change people is a way of saying that we don't accept them the way they are.

And it's really hard to feel heard if that's what you're being confronted with.

Exactly.

I always think back to a friend of mine a while ago sent me forwarded me this text thread that he had with an old high school friend.

They were on two political sides.

And he's like, Monica, like I tried so hard.

Why did nothing get across here?

What's going on?

And I looked at the thread and all they were doing was sending articles to each other.

One of them would send the other, here's the thing from the blaze, just read this.

Here's the thing from the New York Times, just read this.

And they're sending each other information, but from sources that the other doesn't trust, as if it's homework, as if read that article and then you're qualified to talk to me again.

Read that article and then I'll believe that you're worth listening to.

Right.

So I'll borrow a framework from a friend of mine, Buster Benson.

He talks about how there's three conversations across disagreement that we have the conversation about what is true, the conversation about what is meaningful and the conversation about what is useful.

We all want to have the conversation about what is true across disagreement as if it's the only one we can have.

So I get asked a lot, what happens if you're talking to someone and they say something that you know is blatantly untrue?

And people think, well, that's when I hit the abort button.

That's when we're done.

Or it's my moral imperative to correct them until they accept it.

But that's not going to happen most likely.

So instead, what you do is you switch to the conversation about what's meaningful.

You don't talk about that thing that you feel is wrong.

You get behind that and you ask about the concerns behind that.

You ask how that person came to believe and really connect with that idea.

Even when there's no truth in people's conclusions, there's always truth in their stories.

And the last thing I'll say because I'm so glad that you brought up this difference between truth and trust is the conversation about what is true is not effective.

across our society when there is no trust.

And the only conversation that builds trust is the one about where people find meaning and where their concerns and fears and hopes are.

Yeah, so I think of I never thought of it that way moments, Intuit moments for short, as the rewards of a curious conversation.

When you think or say, huh, I never thought of it that way, it's proof that some perspective has crossed that chasm between someone else's mind and your own.

You don't know what impact it will have, but you have noticed it.

And that's saying something, right?

Like our brains have a bajillion thoughts every day, but to be able to have the thought, oh,

That's new.

That's interesting.

That's made a mark on my brain.

Maybe it's planted a seed.

Maybe it will change something that I think of like in 15 years and I'll be a completely different person.

Unlikely, but possible.

Maybe it'll be dug out of the ground tomorrow.

Who knows?

But one way or the other, it's the result of having interacted with different people.

and something now looks richer.

Something has had an added dimension to it.

Some idea has gotten complicated for you.

Because of that, I never thought of it that way moment.

So the way to get those moments is to have more curious conversations, which means that Ted Lasso popularized that quote about, be curious, not judgmental.

It was a really famous scene with darts.

Anyway, it's a great episode.

But the cool thing is that when you are curious,

You cannot also be judgmental in that moment.

When you are judgmental, you cannot also be curious, but you can switch between the two.

By default, we'll often switch from a place of curiosity and then hear something that triggers us and then we'll come back to judgment.

But then once we're in judgment, what you got to do is turn it back to curiosity.

As soon as you have the thought, oh, they're just saying that because they're X.

You can go, well, are they saying that because they're ex?

Why are they saying that?

Let me figure it out.

Let me ask some questions generously and try to hear for the answer.

No, and you're spot on about this.

And in fact, I mean, I've been having lots of conversations about the book and talking with a lot of folks, and this is a very, very common and completely valid, you know, sort of barrier to all this.

But I try to stay curious about these barriers.

And what I ask is,

Why do we keep going to the worst case scenario?

I mean, oftentimes when we hear advice or suggestions about how to tackle something, we don't.

We don't think of the worst possible person that we could talk to and then argue about that.

But that's what we're doing.

And I think it's because we're so afraid.

We're so afraid of each other.

We're afraid of the monster hiding behind our neighbor.

We're afraid of the monster that seems to be motivating all the wacky, horrible things going on in the world.

We're afraid of encountering that person.

The only ask here is for all of us to be one step more curious.

And that can be as little as not even having a conversation with another person.

You could have a more curious conversation with yourself when you're reading an opinion article about the other side, spoken with the voice of the other side.

And as you're reading that article that you would normally doom scroll through and hate tweet, you go, what is the deep down honest human concern?

being expressed here?

Or what is the strongest argument on this other side?

What can I learn from reading this piece?

That in and of itself is being more curious.

The last part of John Powell's anecdote there, you talked about how, yeah, there's a pastor who said, John, are you asking me to bridge with the devil?

And then he says, well, maybe don't start there.

He says,

Do the short bridges.

Don't go for the long bridges right off the bat.

Do the short bridges.

Someone who agrees with you on everything except this one thing.

Someone who doesn't seem to threaten your identity.

Go into a house that's not on fire, it's just warm.

And he says, and after crossing a lot of short bridges, you may ask yourself who you're calling the devil.

And that's the really radical idea.

It's possible that, as I say in my talk, whoever is underrepresented in your life is overrepresented in your imagination.

And if you're not checking that imagination with reality every now and then, you run the risk of living in a higher state of anxiety and with more fear than might actually be justified by the actual hearts and minds of people who disagree with you.

So what if beginning to have those exchanges, doing the small bridges actually reduces your daily emotional labor and turns the volume down on all of this madness so that we could all get more creative because one of the first casualties of fear is creativity and seeing how we can work together and actually solve problems.

So yeah, that's the reframe I'd offer.

We assume people oppose what we support because they hate what we love.

That doesn't just keep us from seeing what we're missing.

It keeps us from staying informed about the one thing that scares us most, each other.

In one CBS YouGov poll this year, most Americans said that the biggest threat to the American way of life is other Americans.

Now, it's true, there are people at our political extremes who are so consumed by hate that they are worth fearing.

But researchers at the University of Pennsylvania looked into the hostility each side sends the other, and they found something fascinating.

They found that people on either side of America's political divide assume the other side despises them twice as much as they actually do.

This fear?

It's a problem, because you can't wonder about something you think is out to get you.

But certainty?

That's much worse.

Honestly, I think it's the only way.

It's the only way to turn out the temperature meaningfully is to go and check these assumptions because it's in the rawness of how we think about things.

And it's witnessing where people themselves are torn because that's another sort of harmful assumption we make is that the people who disagree with us are quite certain.

They're quite sure.

But then you go and talk to them and you talk in this generous way where you're open and candid.

And you see that things are more complex than you might've realized.

Just yesterday, I was at a university and hearing the story from a woman who is very, very pro-choice on the abortion debate and went out in the streets and protested after the reversal of Roe versus Wade, but has managed to maintain a very good friendship with someone who is very pro-life.

But one of the ways it feels that they've maintained that friendship is by never talking about abortion.

And after Roe was reversed, a door opened just to crack.

And she discovered that her pro-life friend

believes in exceptions to abortion bans in the case of rape and incest.

And she was shocked because she always assumed that her friend was so pro-life that she would want to ban abortion in absolutely all cases.

It blew her mind, right?

And so it was a reminder of when we're so certain of each other's views that we don't ask, we actually keep ourselves from knowing the truth about other people, even the people close to us.

even the perspectives of the people who are close to us.

And so how much are we missing when we don't get curious?

I think it's really unlikely that everyone in your circle or in anyone's circle really fully agrees with them on everything.

It's extremely unlikely.

Now, on these more sort of high stakes moral issues, you might think, well, no, there's going to be very little to say, but check it out.

How might we be assuming agreement?

And could we invite nuance into that presumed agreement, right?

So something happens in the headlines, it sort of comes up in conversation, and you can ask about that.

Yeah, what about this issue of having folks in schools with guns?

What do y'all think about that?

And you might discover that your friends have more nuanced ideas than you thought.

There's some interesting kind of values put into tension there for a lot of people, and it may not fall on the red-blue divide.

And in fact, again, I think that's one of the harmful things about our climate is that we assume that everything does really neatly.

So the people close to you may actually be a good starting point if you bring it up and actually ask the question instead of walk through under the presumption that you all mostly agree.

The other thing is that while the internet is, in a lot of ways, in its design, great for dividing us,

It's also fantastic how easily you can find conversations within groups that are generous and that share a certain perspective.

There's all kinds of beautiful communities of libertarians and conservatives and liberals where people are not trying to troll the other side or anything like that, but they're really just connecting with each other.

And there's ways to kind of listen in on that and every now and then kind of pipe up if it's appropriate.

But I find that really interesting that that we're actually expressing ourselves so much that a generous, curious mind can treat the Internet very differently from how we tend to treat it.

Not chasing dopamine lollipops, like chasing moments where we're just activated and sort of engaged in this sort of tribal way.

But but chasing I never thought of it that way moments.

Yeah.

So the first one is time.

A lot of times we start conversations when there just isn't any time.

Someone's on their way out the door.

Someone's really busy and has something to do.

And you don't want to bring up a tough topic when there isn't time to really sit with it because people's impatience will play a role.

The second one is attention.

So how much of the other person's attention do you really have and how much of your attention do they have?

A lot of times we're online and people have a million tabs open and their mind is splintered into a bunch of things.

You don't know if they're waiting for the bus or if they're having a conversation.

If you're on the phone and texting, they're having two other conversations that you're not even privy to.

So only about 20% of their brain is with you every like minute and a half.

So is that a time when you wanna be talking about tough things?

You'd rather have them all there.

Then there's parity, which is P-A-R-I-T-Y, which is about sort of the balance of power.

And I mean this in a platform sense, a sort of technological sense.

If someone's on stage and someone's asking a question with a microphone, the person on stage has the power.

If someone is posting on Facebook and someone is commenting, the person posting on Facebook can erase that comment, block that person, hide it.

You don't have that parody, which is why you often go on social media sites and you see someone post something controversial, right?

And then you're like peering into the comments going, man, I wonder if people kind of disagreed.

And then, well, they never do because we're so used to being filtered out, right, of our friends' pages in a lot of ways.

Then there's containment, which is so important.

Containment is the degree to which your conversation is actually contained to the people participating in it.

Very often on social media and other platforms, we have this huge mass of invisible listeners.

And we don't get to witness their listening.

We don't get any feedback from them whatsoever.

They didn't like the post or not like it.

But for all we know, they're reading what we have to say with a scowl on their face.

So they're making judgments about who we are.

They're going, oh, wow.

Monica's not who I thought she was.

And so we have those projections in our head when we have uncontained conversations.

And so what happens is that we perform our perspectives instead of explore our perspectives.

It's very hard to be candid in an uncontained conversation.

And then finally, embodiment.

And that's just...

How much of the full toolbox of human communication are you actually using?

Are you going to go into a really, really hard job with the tiniest little kit?

Why would you do that?

Why would you leave all your tools at home?

Don't do that.

That's silly.

This is a very hard job.

Bring it all.

Bring your gestures.

Bring your tone.

Things like goodwill.

don't easily get communicated in words when you're having an argument.

They could communicate it in people's faces, how they smile, the tension releasing giggles in the middle of things.

This is important.

It is more difficult on social media, but it is not impossible.

To quote a friend of mine, social media is the boss level of discourse.

You have to put into words the things that you normally just communicate automatically, like goodwill, like good intent and wanting to build trust and this sort of welcoming attitude.

that we have in our faces when we ask a question with compassion.

And so it's about bringing all of that into the limited tool set and platform that you have.

And it absolutely is possible.

I think a big, big, and maybe the most important tool is modeling.

So if you want to have a context of intellectual humility, of openness, and of candor, you model it.

So I try to do that as soon as I can in a conversation.

Get us past...

any kind of pretense get us past the talking points, right?

Because most of the time what people will do when they don't feel very secure to actually explore their real perspectives is they will just grab the talking point that they've seen other people take shelter under.

And so when we do that, when it's just talking point versus talking point, we're basically having proxy battles, proxy conversations, they're not real.

You mentioned earlier in this conversation, how awesome it is actually when a curious conversation helps us understand what we think,

When somebody asks us that, what a gift it is to actually be like, oh, do my ideas cohere?

And to see some of the contradictions and dissonance in our own narratives.

I was going to call one of my chapters early on by a phrase that somebody said that gave me an I never thought of it that way moment.

And the phrase was, meaning is in people, not words.

And it really struck me because...

We, I think, can become very legalistic with each other about words and about language and about what is meant by them.

Because we so often spend time in communities that are like-minded, we develop our own language and then we begin to think this is the only right language.

And in fact, when people use different language, it's clearly because they oppose

what our language encodes and embodies and supports.

They oppose these things, but there's other places where the words themselves encode certain values and some people's political perspective doesn't feel well reflected in a certain term.

So, for example, there's sort of voter rights, voter suppression, voting integrity, trustworthy elections.

What is the best name

for what's going on with elections right now.

And depending on what your biggest concern is, you might think voter suppression is by far the best name.

Or you might think that voter security, voting security and election security is by far the best name.

So how can you have the same conversation?

How do you make sure that you don't

take the fact that someone's using a different name as all of a sudden, that's it, it's over.

I can be certain that they believe these things that would oppose me.

What I've found is that the opposite is almost always the case.

There's a lot of nuance there.

And by bringing your name and your concerns

Mixing it in with theirs, you both get wiser and richer and realize that, oh, this is complicated.

This is I mean, I'm still I feel really strongly about voter suppression.

I feel really strongly about election security.

But now I've talked to someone who's telling me that there's this other piece that's really big for them that I'm probably not thinking hard enough about.

So it's in my years of journalism that I've learned some of the most powerful ways to really understand people.

And I've taken seriously that that's my job.

My job as a journalist is understand this person, where they're coming from, why they support what they support, what have you.

And then hope, hope, hope that I can do a good enough job representing that to their community so that the community can make better decisions.

That's my job.

So you come into this conversation seeking to understand.

And one of the most effective ways to do that is to help people become storytellers.

Not just, what do you think?

Why do you think it?

But instead, OK, I understand this is your position.

What led you to this?

Tell me about that.

Oh, give me an example of when that happened.

And so getting people to weave their story is amazing because a really cool thing happens to your mind too.

Your mind gets out of the mode of just evaluating the goodness or badness of ideas or even the logic of them.

And it goes into a mode of sort of playing someone else's movie in your head.

And it goes such a long way toward that person feeling heard

And you actually hearing them and actually kind of stepping into their shoes a little bit.

And that unlocks so much.

So that's a wonderful, a wonderful thing.

And then the other is, honestly, the most powerful question that I've asked as a journalist is just simply, what are your concerns?

And then you can ask the flip side of that.

The brighter side of the same exact question is, what do you hope for?

If this happens, what do you hope to see?

And either way, that gets you a sense of where people put meaning onto events and policies and ideas.

It's where their meaning comes from, what their values are, what their value hierarchies are.

And man, that just that just brings to life a person.

Oh my gosh, what a fun question.

I am trying to be much more present with my children.

The times when I have my phone and my attention is divided and they're around, or my daughter comes up to show me her latest drawing, she draws and draws and draws all day long.

And then I snap at her a little bit, even just a little bit, because I'm trying to finish this email.

It's

oh it just kills me inside and it's every time it does that a little piece of me dies and so i recently took all my social media and my email and took it off my phone and i put it in like a secondary old phone that's just glued to my desk and doesn't leave and when i come upstairs from my downstairs office i'm with my family

Totally.

Thank you for having me.

This was fun.