I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times

by Monica Guzmán

Given the chance to ask anything I wanted about who people are, what they do, or what they think, I realized what for years I’d been too petrified to notice: everybody’s so inexhaustibly interesting.

One of my favorite questions to ask in any interview is, “Why you?”

I do it because connecting with other humans is what makes our lives rich and meaningful. Especially when so much can pull us apart.

I began to see political polarization as the problem that eats other problems, the monster who convinces us that the monsters are us.

In 2021, I joined the leadership of Braver Angels, the largest grassroots, cross-partisan organization in the country dedicated to political depolarization.

We know what happens when the people we love don’t think we really see them: they go find someone who will.

Nothing busts through the walls we’ve built between us like a question so genuine and perceptive it cannot be denied. Nothing.

This book will equip and inspire you to be one level more curious about people who disagree with you than you have ever been.

We get together into groups. We’ll call this sorting. •We push off against groups that seem opposed to us. We’ll call this othering. •We sink deeper into our groups and our stories, where it’s harder to hear anything else. We’ll call this siloing.

Too often, othering makes monsters of good people.

What’s underrepresented in your communities will be underrepresented in your life and overrepresented in your imagination.

Social media has made it simple to draw circles around what we do and don’t want to hear.

Othering goes too far when it tricks us into shrinking our world instead of expanding it.

When we focus so much on the righteousness of our side, we stop thinking straight, we stop seeing straight, and we lose the ability to truly consider what’s different.

Your silos are not neutral pits of preferred information. Online, they are structured by platforms that want you to consume that information as long as possible.

We get our news increasingly from within our silos, from the voices and spaces that make up our preferred sources of information. And the more time we spend on the news, it turns out, the more distorted our view of the other side becomes.

News organizations reflect their audiences,

Siloing goes too far when the stories we tell about each other are not only wrong but demeaning. When we spend so much time in spaces that intensify our basest judgments that we believe the other side is barely human at all.

What happens in the world matters, but our interpretation of what happens in the world matters more.

My friend Traca—who’s made it a point for years to have three “curious conversations” a day—kept thinking about INTOIT moments long after I first described the concept to her. “It gives me a way to explore my own beliefs,” she told me. “And through that process, sometimes, I end up holding those beliefs a bit looser than before.”

put yourself in spaces where you can interact with people from outside your silos—spaces where it’s possible to explore the boundary between their perspectives and your own.

Curiosity flips on when you see a gap—any gap—between what you know and what you want to know.

When we’re in conversation, we’re somewhere we’ve never been before. We’re meeting particular minds in particular states at some particular moment.

When digital platforms display our conversations to huge groups of people, those conversations become as much or more about performing our perspectives than exploring them.

There is one and only one context where human beings can use 100 percent of our embodiment to (try to!) make ourselves understood, and that’s in-person interaction.

Good listening is not silent waiting.

The problem isn’t the partial answers we’re always collecting from a variety of sources in our busy lives. It’s the questions we stop asking because we think we’ve learned enough.

People are mysteries, not puzzles. This means we can never be sure about them. But we can always be curious.

Human intuition may not hinge on reason, but it does hinge on something more significant—a lived life. Who’s right or wrong is a separate question.

A lot of our discourse happens on the internet, a nonplace that makes us into nonpeople.

We act as if all the people who express A really believe Z. So it’s that much harder to listen to each other—or even want to—across these toxic, warping divides.

“We have an assumption that people choose their opinions,” he told the audience. But they don’t. “Their beliefs form naturally over the course of their lives.”

“Which do you value more: the truth or your own beliefs?

I know I’ve switched to the bad kind of win/lose mode in a conversation when instead of listening for meaning, or a contrast, or a gap, I’m just hunting for my edge. I scout for something to sabotage: a weakness. A slipup. A contradiction to attack and exploit. I observe myself abusing rhetoric to maneuver and set traps. I zoom closer into one or another detail, getting overly picky about wording and consistency with the person’s past statements, pulling for a “gotcha,” stomping out the sparks of every good point, and reading way too much into every misstatement.

respect is not only necessary to bridge-building conversation, but critical. “I think it means I interact with you in ways that recognize your full humanity regardless of your identity or beliefs,”

He advised the graduates to set a reminder on their phones every day called “Understand someone else,” to read an article they disagree with every day, and to have a conversation with someone from outside their like-minded networks every week. “Plant seeds for more understanding and humanity every place you can,” he told the students. “You never know where they will sprout.”

We get stuck on opinion when we obsess over winning and persuading at the expense of learning, and we treat our opinions as proxies for who we and others are—overguarding

If you want to be more curious when you talk to people who think differently from you, don’t try to win or change minds.

what about where you—and they—have been? We get stuck on opinion, too, when we lose sight of the person who holds it—a person who’s arrived at that opinion after walking a path we can’t see.

when you know their stories, people make sense.

people can’t know what they’ve never experienced.