But what I see is is avoidance that's being conflated with courage, you know?

Like all the times that people who think of themselves as doing really good by their cause,

you know, write a social media post that really really takes down the other argument and gets tons of likes.

Have they persuaded anyone on the other side?

Have they effectuated change with that?

And the answer is no, because all those, it's mostly siloed anyway.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

My guest today is Monica Guzman.

Monica is a senior fellow at Braver Angels, and she is also the author of Great Book Court.

I never thought of it that way, how to have fearlessly curious conversations

in dangerously divided times. We had a conversation about a topic that can sometimes feel a little

bit hokey or do good a read. But as you will see, moniker is none of those things. The topic is how,

you know, at a moment when it's really easy to hate your partisan opponent,

when it's really easy to feel that a lot of people who hold power in our politics and our society don't have good intentions, that perhaps they have values that are so radically different from your own,

that it's not worth engaging with them. We should nevertheless try to seek genuine conversations,

have genuinely meaningful encounters with people who have different beliefs from our own.

In the conversation, we talk about why that matters instrumentally, if you want to be

effective in actually advancing your own political position, but also intrinsically, if you

don't want to feel as though you live in a hostile

world in which everybody has it out to you.

In the bonus part of this episode, we also apply this to the personal sphere.

There's a lot of people right now who encourage you to cut out all of your quote-unquote toxic relationships.

...