 The most important thing, I think, is to enter the conversation without the agenda of changing somebody's mind. If you do that, you're going to be received as an attacker. When you let that go, you create an opportunity for the other person to listen. And a variety of approaches can work once you've established that on an energetic level. And sometimes it might take a little bit of work to even get there, because people are so accustomed to every conversation being a debate. For every conversation, either to be somebody who's going to corroborate your story about it and reinforce your opinions and we get to be right together, or it's going to be somebody from the other side and you're going to debate or politely agree to disagree or awkwardly move past that and talk about the weather or something like that. So the habits are pretty strong here. So it might take a little time to establish trust, to establish that I'm not trying to change your mind here. I'm wanting to have a conversation. And once that's been established or as that is established, then a variety of different approaches can work. One of them could be to tell a story that may not fit the other person's orthodoxy, that may not fit their account of the kinds of things that happen in the world. So it could be, for example, the story of an African American kid who's playing with a squirt gun and he gets shot by the police or something like that, or an African American man who is smoking a cigarette outside of his apartment building after work. He works as a chauffeur. This is a true story, by the way, and he's about to go inside, but he's going to have a cigarette first and stop and frisk police operation comes by and arrests him for blocking pedestrian traffic, even though it's midnight and there's nobody on the sidewalk. Like that actually happened. So it could be a story like that. And those stories often, you're not going to find those stories on a right-wing website because stories like that are typically used as ammunition in an assault on a certain position. But if they are presented in another way, the more you can present them without an agenda of I'm going to change your mind, the more likely it is that that story will be heard and received. And so it could be, for example, presented with, you know, this is a really complex issue, because on the one hand, you have, you know, maybe you're right, maybe there are welfare cheats or something like that. But then again, I heard this story, you know, and I know this guy, and so if it's presented, but you have to watch for that internal agenda of wanting to use this to change their mind. Rather, and the alternative then is to say, I trust you to change your mind if it is time for your mind to change when you have access to more information. I think that stories are a more powerful way to communicate than argumentation, especially when the stories are not used as implements of an argument. They can be effectively used that way. In fact, I think an effective argument, there is a role in this world for arguments, okay, for a logical presentation of a case. I'm not denying that, but that is only a small part of the way that people evolve in their worldviews. Generally speaking, the more that you can be an agent for the broadening of the information set that people receive, the more you will serve their evolution of their worldview. And so it's kind of almost a paradox. In order to change somebody's mind, you have to not try to change their mind. It's a trust, instead, in their intelligence. One thing that works for me is to say things that just don't fit into anything that they're expecting or have heard before. So there's a double take, hold on. My evangelical friend back home from childhood, I don't agree with him, so therefore I must be whatever his caricature of the other side is. I name it as an NPR liberal. So then I'll say some things that totally don't fit into his stereotype of NPR liberal. And then he has this mini crisis where he can't categorize me, and that can create an opening. And because so many of our polarizing issues are set up, so that actually neither side is going very deep, there's wonderful opportunities to name the deeper issues that both sides are ignoring. Like my favorite example is immigration, and talking about the international debt system. I mean, liberal conservative, nobody's talking about that. Nobody's talking about what generates immigration, maybe not nobody, but that's an example of something that politicized people don't have a conceptual category for. And that means that they cannot easily categorize you as the enemy, as this caricature of the NPR liberal or something like that. And in that moment of confusion, a listening is invited. You invite a listening. And so that's a general rule. But it requires to the extent that you inhabit the caricature, it requires stepping out of that. So there's perhaps a letting go of your own polarized position. The two polarized positions hold each other up. If you abandon yours, you're generating an invitation for the other person to abandon theirs. It doesn't mean that yours is wrong, but it means that you're not attached to it being right. You're willing for it to be wrong in search of the truth. That willingness is infectious.