Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about Truth, Disinformation and the Media with Eric Schurenberg, a long-time journalist and media exec, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

In Reality is dedicated to the proposition that there is such a thing as objective truth and that the pursuit of it is a noble effort, one that over the centuries has increased human well being. Some objectively verifiable claims are the source of division in the US right now: the 2020 Presidential election was, in fact, legitimate. The covid pandemic was real, not a hoax.

But that doesn’t mean everyone accepts those facts. And if we are going to thrive as a democracy, if we are going to rebuild trust in the institutions crucial to that form of government, including media, we need to be able to get past differences. Not just on facts, but also on the matters of opinion, or faith, or moral judgment that divide us. That’s where today’s guest comes in.

Monica Guzman is the senior fellow for public practice at Braver Angels, an organization devoted to sparking civil conversations across the political divide, also author of a book Eric enjoyed: I Never Thought of it That Way. How to Have Fearless Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. They talk about the search for commonality even in our most divisive issues and the power of curiosity.

 

Transcript

Eric Schurenberg (00:01.27)
Monica, welcome to In Reality.

Monica (00:03.639)
Hey, thanks for having me.

Eric Schurenberg (00:05.326)
You are senior fellow for public practice at Braver Angels, host of Brave Away podcast, founder and CEO of Reclaimed Curiosity, author of a wonderful book. I never thought of it that way, How to Have Fearless Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. You’re asked to speak all the time. You’re essentially the poster kid for bridging divides in our polarized times. Now, I’d like you to just cut, I mean, there’s a…

There’s the overview of you, Monica. Give us a short idea of Braver Angels, what it does and what also what it means to be the senior fellow for public practice there.

Monica (00:44.057)
So Braver Angels, it’s the nation’s largest cross-partisan and grassroots organization that’s working exclusively on the political divide, really focusing our attention there, trying to bring the right and the left together. It’s largely about trust. The idea is not to try to get people to change their minds about the issues, but to try to get people to change their minds about each other so that we can see and work on

the issues at all. There’s so much research about misperceptions across the divide, exaggerations across the divide, vilifications across the divide, and it’s making us a bit blind and unproductive. So that’s part of it, but it’s also the pain of broken relationships. You know, the frustration of community dysfunction.

Eric Schurenberg (01:15.278)
Hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (01:37.45)
Mm.

Monica (01:42.103)
These things are affecting us in our day-to-day lives, certainly all the way to the top, right? Up and down the institutional ladder. Hyperpolarization, toxic polarization has its consequences. So Braver Angels is working on building trust through programs, skills building, practices through our virtual debates, all kinds of ways to help people see each other so they can see the debates so we can work on thriving together.

Eric Schurenberg (02:09.424)
And what does it mean to be a senior fellow for public practice there?

Monica (02:13.207)
Hey,

Eric Schurenberg (02:34.647)
okay.

Monica (02:42.861)
that we can all try and learn and making those tools more accessible to people. That is what I do as Senior Fellow of Public.

Eric Schurenberg (02:50.964)
Well, great. And we’ll talk about those tools over the course of this conversation. You spoke just a second ago about, quite emotionally, I would say, about the emotional damage, the damage to our communities, also not to minimize it, to our families by the political divide. And there is a political divide in your family that may have something to do with this mission that you’re on. And it’s certainly something a lot of Americans can identify with. Tell us about that.

Monica (03:21.015)
Yeah, it was the launch pad. I’m from a politically divided family of Mexican immigrants. And my parents took the citizenship test and passed in the year 2000. I became immediately naturalized as their 17 year old daughter at the time. They went and got a Bush Cheney sign to put, you know, in our house. And I said, okay, I see how it is. Because I was

Definitely leaning Democrat and they definitely went Republican and it has been a roller coaster ever since with all the split media, you know, the Glenn Beck, the Rachel Maddow, the debates over dinner, lots of debates. If you hear me and my family in conversation, I mean, there’s no filters. What are filters? There’s no filters. So the 2016 presidential election and campaign tested us like nothing else just like it did so many families across the country and The way that I remember that lots of lots of scenes from that time but the contrast the contrast between how My parents and I were able to talk about some really hard things about the political choices. We were gonna make and Somehow stay in conversation even though we got really mad even though it got…

…really hot, you know, in those conversations. We stayed somehow. And the contrast between that and so many relationships breaking, so much trust burning for understandable reasons, and I emerged from that going, hang on, hang on, hang on. I think we can do this. I think there are tools. I think we can do this. And that’s what led to the book.

Eric Schurenberg (05:12.728)
Great. The tools are useless without a of baseline assumption that underneath it all there is a layer of commonality that earns trust, that deserves trust. In reality, we’ve had Matthew Lefebvre of More in Common. He’s talked about the research that his organization did about the perception gap, the idea that Democrats and Republicans have distorted ideas about how radical…

…the other side is, but that research was 2018. And though I quoted a lot, I haven’t seen much since then supporting it. kind of defend for me if you would the idea that, you know, the baseline idea that we actually have more in common than we think is still true.

Monica (06:05.633)
It is still true and more in common itself has continued to do research. Just last week I saw a new survey from them that looked at perceptions from either side of the political divide about whether and how much the other side even wants us united. And there’s perception gaps in that as well on both sides. Democrats think that Republicans don’t really want us united. They want to split apart. That’s how they do their evil bidding, right?

Eric Schurenberg (06:22.552)
Hmm.

Monica (06:33.337)
And vice versa, Republicans think the same of Democrats, but we do all want a healthy democracy. We do all want these things. So yes, the perception gap is still there and the work has been replicated and it is fresh. So the numbers show it is one thing. And I certainly feel it. I feel it intuitively in my work. I spend a lot of time getting close to people who really disagree with me or watching others do that often for the first time in their own lives and one of the refrains that just keeps repeating itself is I had no idea. I had no idea that somebody who voted for you know him would think that or wouldn’t think that. This this constantly happens. The the cycle that we’ve been in for years now is this that we are judging each other more and engaging each other less. So what are our judgments based on?

Because they are not based on engaging with primary source material. And you’re a journalist, I’m a journalist, I like primary sources. The primary sources for what people think and believe and why are us. But we are distancing ourselves more and more from that primary source. We are relying more and more on the secondary tertiary narratives and commentary that exist in media and that are often kind of infected by, you know, these forces and incentives in our politics and media both to get attention and to win elections. So it really is very easy these days to amp up fear, to amp up whatever it takes to exaggerate, to mobilize, whatever it takes. And we are more vulnerable to those signals than ever because we’re not talking to each other.

Eric Schurenberg (08:20.76)
Hmm. Hmm. It is, I mean, it’s certainly there are many perverse incentives in media, particularly in social media, but also, you know, in the mainstream media that I came from to deepen divides, to campaign for audiences by painting the other side and demonizing the other side. What are the areas where you have discovered that there are surprising commonalities.

Monica (08:53.123)
Well, there’s quite a bit of commonality even in what looked like our most divisive issues. I remember it was Governor Spencer Cox of Utah who pointed this out in the beginning to me I was like, is that right? And then I went and dug it up. And this was around immigration. So Governor Cox came to the Braver Angels Convention and mentioned, you know, if there’s one issue that if we could just see what we actually believe, I think we could figure out it’s immigration.

And it’s true. If you look at the specifics of what people believe about, you know, comprehensive immigration reform, about the borders, about security, there is a ton of common ground there. It’s just not been talked about that way. And so it’s not the impression people have. And perception is more important than reality in politics. I think we’ve all seen that. We’ve all felt the truth of that. So, yes. So if you take issue by issue,

Things like guns things like immigration. It’s a surprising amount of overlap in the actual opinions of actual Americans that really flies in the face of the perception we have based on how divisive that that issue appears to be in the ways that we talk about it out in the world. So that’s one thing. But the you know, the place where we do all agree the one thing that you will find consensus all across the political divide is that we are

despairingly divided is that we that something is broken and I find that to be actually a really promising start because what that means is I believe that in the working on this problem we can unlock the trust and tools to work on all the other problems which is awfully convenient because I find the toxic polarization is the problem that keeps us from solving all the other problems.

Eric Schurenberg (10:37.282)
Hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (10:44.916)
And at least according to what you just said, people on both sides of the aisle recognize that it’s a problem.

Monica (10:51.255)
Yeah, they really do.

Eric Schurenberg (10:53.93)
Your superpower, and the superpower you would like us all to cultivate is curiosity. And I think probably most of the listeners to this podcast would say, yeah, they’re curious people eager to expand their knowledge. But the evidence of how polarized we are suggests that when it comes to really embracing curiosity, we may be fooling ourselves. Why is it so hard to be truly curious?

Monica (11:21.261)
Yeah, because curiosity is not a personality trait. It’s not a static condition. It is a practice. So the question to ask is not, am I a curious person? As if this is a static state. The question to ask is, in the heat of a moment when I am angry, can I still be curious? In the moment when I wanna win, can I still be curious? In the moment when I feel attacked, can I still be curious? Those are the questions to ask.

Eric Schurenberg (11:33.571)
Hmm.

Monica (11:50.893)
And you can only ask those questions actively in those situations. But when you’re in those situations, it’s the hardest place to build the kind of psychological muscle. So there’s all kinds of things we can do to set ourselves up for success when those different competing priorities come up, right? Things like wanting to win, things like feeling attacked, those are things that happen kind of.

Eric Schurenberg (12:03.694)
Hmm.

Monica (12:19.297)
unconsciously, we’re not selecting them necessarily. We just find ourselves trapped by those things. And I can’t tell you, look, a lot of people think like, she wrote the book, you you called me what, like the poster kid for bridging divides and sure, I’m happy to carry that torch. But the truth is, if you were to sit down with me when I’m talking to somebody and I’m getting mad, you would be like, she wrote what book? No, she didn’t. Because these things are hard and we all have our tendencies.

I work on my weaknesses on this every day, every day. I interrupt people, I’m a first mover. Gosh, what’s the other thing I do? I often manipulate, I manipulate, because I’m a pretty seasoned communicator. So I can kind of sense the ups and downs of conversation and strike. But then I can’t be curious, can I? If I’m not leaving room for other people.

Eric Schurenberg (13:06.424)
Mmm.

Eric Schurenberg (13:13.772)
Hmm

Monica (13:16.065)
if I’m not reminding myself of the infinite dignity that everybody carries and the fact that we are all qualified to talk about all the issues because we all have the expertise of having lived our own lives and walked our own path on this earth. And we are all sharing this country, state, city, community. We all have a stake in it. So, but still those instincts will come to try to disqualify someone from a conversation, to try to drown them out with my facts and it.

It’s not great. It’s not curious. So even I am not always curious. And I think it begins with admitting that.

Eric Schurenberg (13:52.632)
Well, that is great. And I appreciate your candor and I will jump in by pointing out often as I remind people to in their media diet to consume points of view from the other side. If you look at my newsfeed, you would see it leans particularly in one way and it takes a deliberate decision to go, yeah. And I should look over at the other side as well and see what they’re saying about that. So let’s go back to curiosity.

I’m glad to hear that even for you, it doesn’t come easy. You have among the many very useful and practical checklists, I’d call them in your book is one called the Curiosity Starter Kit with mind the gap, get knowledge, reject easy answers. Walk us through that checklist if you don’t mind the Curiosity Starter Kit.

Monica (14:45.965)
Yeah, so mind the gap. That’s about paying attention and keeping your attention on the things you don’t actually know. So the neuroscience of curiosity has shown us that curiosity, the sort of craving for knowledge is sparked at the gap between what you know and what you don’t know. But unlike hunger, which is a craving for food, you’re hungry until you eat, but you’re only curious as long as your attention is on that gap.

that missing piece, that thing you don’t know. If you’re distracted away from that gap, chiefly by making an assumption, believing in assumption, what’s an assumption? It’s the answer to a question you never asked. And so you’ll paper over that gap, you’ll no longer see it. And if you don’t think there’s anything worth asking, then you won’t ask it, right? Then you won’t be curious. So there’s that.

Eric Schurenberg (15:29.678)
Hmm.

Monica (15:42.711)
Then we have, let’s see, and I’m gonna pause for a minute because nobody’s asked me this in a long time and I forgot the order, Eric. Can you give me the order? Yeah. Okay, okay. Yes, get knowledge. This begins with humility because if you have to find something out, that means you don’t know it yourself. And you may not know it by going to the typical places that you might go. If you wanna know something that is confounding because of a divide,

Eric Schurenberg (15:49.58)
Okay, the second one, yeah, the second one is get knowledge.

Monica (16:12.397)
Then go to places where you’ll encounter people who don’t agree with you. See what you can expose yourself to. And the beautiful sort of cycle of curiosity is once you begin to hear something unfamiliar and new and surprising, the gaps will just start to show up in your head. Wait, what do they mean by that? Wait, where did that come from? Hold on, I wanna know more, right? So then you just combine that with mind the gap and you’ve already got a cycle going. You get knowledge, new gaps.

You ask your questions, get knowledge and boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And it just kind of reinforces itself. Embracing complexity and avoiding the easy answers. So you’ve got to reject the easy answers. These were the assumptions that I was talking about. But there’s lots of others too. When we are really anxious about something and we know that there’s disagreement in our communities, in our societies, it’s really uncomfortable.

to keep the uncertainty. So psychologists talk about what we do here. We have NFC, a need for certainty, a need for closure, and we manufacture certainty. It’s actually what we do. So even though there just isn’t sufficient evidence to believe something, we want to believe it so that we can resolve this really uncomfortable uncertainty. Why did those people vote that way? And so we’ll read this thought piece on the internet.

and it’ll sound very confident and it’ll have some statistics and we’ll want to emerge from that going, I know, I know why 70 million people made this choice. I know all I need to know about it. It’s because of these things explained in 800 words, I’m done. And so you’ll accept that easy answer and what you’ll have built in your head as a wall. Now, well, no, I don’t need to talk to anybody else. I already know. No, you don’t.

Eric Schurenberg (17:59.404)
Mm-hmm.

Monica (18:03.929)
You know absolutely nothing. You know a bunch of patterns somebody made up. You could have made up a bunch of other patterns. You can connect a lot of threads, but the primary source is the people. Now, embracing complexity. When it feels too hard, when it’s just too confusing, we don’t want to start exploring and investigating it. We don’t even know where to begin. It’s too much. It’s overwhelming, right? So we’ll just…

We’ll just choose to sort of be emotional about that question we have. Right? How could anybody believe this? I just, it’s just too big a mystery. can’t, right? But if you reframe confusion as complexity. Okay, this is confusing. Confusing is annoying. Confusing is frustrating. This is complex. It’s complex. Okay. There’s a lot. There’s a lot I need to understand. Okay. But we can still take the first step, right? Let’s go. Let’s go talk to someone or look.

Talking to someone doesn’t have to be the first step. Talk to yourself as you are reading the perspective of someone who disagrees. Talk to yourself the next time that you see an opinion column that’s popular about putting forth a perspective you disagree with, but you know is widely held. And as you read that column, instead of looking for ammo, which we all do, instead ask yourself, what is the strongest argument on this side?

Eric Schurenberg (19:18.904)
Mm-hmm.

Monica (19:30.253)
You know, really, really the strongest argument on this side. And ask yourself what deep down concerns, honest concerns are animating this perspective. And if you can think about those two questions, that kind of soften your mind a bit, you may learn something. You may connect with the values animating the opposition in this particular case. And you’ll embrace some complexity.

Eric Schurenberg (19:33.058)
Mm-hmm.

Monica (19:58.005)
in that you will sort of open your mind to understanding why people believe what they believe, which brings down the temperature in your own mind, which lowers the emotionality, which raises the capacity for good judgment. And boy, if we all could do more of that, we could actually start figuring things out, I think.

Eric Schurenberg (20:17.806)
Well, I love that checklist. Not easy to do and embracing complexity. There are so many incentives to avoid that. No politician ever got elected by giving complex answers to difficult problems. And certainly no tweet solved complex issues in 280 characters. But that is definitely the way forward. Now, you’re big on curiosity.

Monica (20:31.107)
No.

That’s for sure.

Monica (20:39.385)
You

Eric Schurenberg (20:45.902)
You’re not so big on reason. Why is reason not the sort of golden path to the truth? Seems like it ought to be.

Monica (20:48.546)
Mm-hmm.

Monica (20:58.591)
say that it isn’t. What I will say is that we tend to overvalue it and therefore not notice when we are reasoning our way to intransigence and a stuckness. And that happens so often that we are so confident about our own reasoning capacities that we fail to see how our reason can actually keep us from expansively asking questions. So, you know, one

Classic example is motivated reasoning. And that’s the psychological kind of dynamic where we believe what we want to believe. How? By coming up with really great reasons to. You know, that’s what we do. It’s instinct before reason is usually how it goes. And there’s lots of work on this, but it’s our intuitions. If we feel that it ought to be a certain way, we’re gonna put some cognitive effort.

into justifying our feelings, justifying our ideas to others. And there we go to our inner reasoner and we go, hey, got a task for you. So the reasoner, the reasoning is more of our press secretary than it is our super objective arbiter of truth. That’s not what it is. And so we have to be really careful. And research has shown that people who are really cognitively adept, right, can rationalize really well, quickly, beautifully.

You might think, okay, people who are really good at that would be really good at recognizing countervailing evidence to something they believe and adapting that evidence into their worldview and changing their mind if they need to, right? Nope, the opposite is true. People who are really good at cognitively rationalizing and reasoning something will be really good at quickly coming up with great reasons not to accept the countervailing evidence. So this is why reason cannot be our ultimate North Star.

Eric Schurenberg (22:56.344)
Good. Monica, I’m ask you to walk through a couple of the real pressure points in our political landscape right now, and tell me how you would approach them from the point of view of all the things that we’ve discussed, about curiosity, for example, and good judgment and understanding the other. So, one of the, seems to be most powerful divides right now is whether the 2020 election was stolen. I mean, we just went through

Monica (23:23.897)
Mm.

Eric Schurenberg (23:25.906)
a series of Senate interviews with potential cabinet members in which those cabinet members refused to say that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. Clearly this is some kind of loyalty test. How do you understand that good people will take the point of view that the 2020 election was stolen despite, you know, a great deal of evidence from, say, the judicial system that it was a fair election.

Monica (24:00.065)
Right. Well, it’s a good case study in how it’s all about story and what stories signal. It’s one of the consequences of having such split realities and such divided, siloed groups of folks. Our concerns are so genuine and so different, you know, across the divide. Obviously a lot more diverse than red and blue. There’s a lot of complexity there.

But to generalize, yeah, there’s a different set of concerns. And in part because we have just been so separated in our media, in our conversations, those concerns have been sort of hard coded to look at the world in a certain way. So things like what happened in the 2020 election just look vastly different to the American public, where one side has a lot of questions like COVID and mail-in voting. Like, I don’t know, I really, really don’t trust it. I saw some stuff…

…in the news and on social media that looked pretty shady and I had, I just don’t know. know, a lot of people are really concerned about that. The other side was living in a world of like, that was absurd from the beginning. We know that there was no evidence for it at all. And all these judges appointed by your side, like didn’t even see it. So we live in these different realities and we do live in a time when it’s just so hard to access and really humbly embrace a search for truth.

Because other things appear to be more important. know, things like belonging to a side. And look, we’re talking about the 2020 election, but there’s a lot of issues where this has come up. And I would say there’s a lot of issues where the blindness goes the other way, you might say. And that’s part of the problem. Blues and Reds, to speak very, very generally, are not seeing the world the way the other side sees it.

Eric Schurenberg (25:35.342)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Monica (25:57.301)
And we need to see the additive world in order to see the United States of America. We need to see it all together. But yeah, you asked a question with many other pieces that I forgot. So feel free to put me back on track.

Eric Schurenberg (26:12.494)
That I think is a chasm between red and blue right now. It’s sad, but that’s hard to deny. The other one you mentioned earlier on and Governor Cox of Utah pointed it out in the Braver Angels Conference was immigration. And among other things that we’ve seen just recently in the first couple of weeks of the second Trump administration is

but a lot of powerful actions taken to limit immigration policy. And most recently, several hundred thousand Venezuelans who were here under legal status will be losing that if that action sticks. You are the daughter of immigrants. You’re an immigrant yourself. How do you feel about that? How do you separate your own emotions about that with the

Monica (27:03.811)
I’m an immigrant.

Eric Schurenberg (27:10.604)
the knowledge that there are a number of people who regard people who came from, who were born elsewhere with suspicion.

Monica (27:20.973)
with difficulty and with understanding, which I know may sound weird. My own father, you know, not all immigrants vote left. Lots of immigrants vote right. So, and it’s just, when you look a lot closer, there’s so much going on. And one of the things that makes

Eric Schurenberg (27:27.139)
Hmm.

Eric Schurenberg (27:38.786)
Yes, we saw that.

Monica (27:49.885)
my father conservative is a certain regard for boundaries and a certain prioritization of security and things like that. Not to mention in his own life story, a real, real respect for the United States of America and kind of a confoundedness that this country that seems so on top of its game compared to Mexico can’t for the life of itself.

enforce its own immigration laws. So I understand. All sides believed that our immigration system is in dire need of help.

We voted democratically for someone with some very, very strong ideas about how to fix it, who is taking these first weeks of his administration to blitz, blitz, throw it all out there so fast that the other branches of government are just like, their heads are spinning, they’re trying to keep up. This is part of the strategy. Part of the strategy is the fear. Part of the strategy is the signaling the stories that we are all circulating.

the stories of fear. I’ve seen so many of my friends here in Seattle so afraid. And it makes sense. When are they gonna come? My family, we’re all under threat. could all be just kicked out of our lives that fast. that’s where the emotional, separating the emotional from the more rational part for me is really hard because that’s what makes me the most angry.

is the fact that we have gotten, you that our institutions are sort of weak enough in the right places where, because look, I’m all for, look, policy change. I’m all for policy change. We’re a democratic republic. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, right? And things got to get tried and I get that. But the fact that we’re at this place where the kinds of reckless actions can happen with such

Monica (29:57.973)
little grounding and they can just sweep people up in this terror? That’s not okay with me. That is not okay with me. But I try to channel my anger for that, right? Where do I channel my anger? And I channel it right back into my work. Because I see the seeds of that fear planted in a lot of places and not just in the rhetoric of the side that is taking these harsh actions. I also see the seeds of fear planted in the inability

Eric Schurenberg (30:14.606)
Mm-hmm.

Monica (30:28.217)
for people to get to know each other and meet each other across difference because when we do that, it’s a heck of a lot easier to vilify a whole group of people. It’s a heck of a lot easier to be suspicious and to believe the stories you hear about how they’re making your life worse. And we’re not complicating those narratives enough where it counts. the seeds are everywhere and it just brings me right back into my work with discipline because without discipline,

Eric Schurenberg (30:43.886)
Mm-hmm.

Monica (30:58.425)
It’s not gonna happen. If we’re all swept up and overwhelmed, it’s not gonna happen. And let me just say too for listeners, I hold complicated views on immigration. I hold some complicated views. So I think that the truth of a good immigration policy will result from people getting together, sharing all the concerns, putting them all on the table and finding the best balance for now.

I don’t think it will be achieved by just doing what one side or the other wants.

Eric Schurenberg (31:32.942)
I agree with you and I would rephrase this to say that a good immigration policy will result from truth and not from spreading fear or telling stories that are exaggerated or making things up to make a point, as we saw, say for example, about patients in Springfield, Ohio. You have spoken to the Nieman Lab at Harvard among your many appearances addressing journalists there and advising them on how to do their job in a way that helps to bridge divides rather than deepen them. What was your advice to the journalists?

Monica (32:14.475)
Hmm, it keeps changing. It keeps evolving. But, you know, the one that comes up now, we’ve been talking about truth. I, I’ve just been reflecting a lot on the connection between truth and trust. When it comes to the role of journalists, you know, we count on journalism as the fourth estate, as as as institution of a democratic republic, to communicate responsibly to share

accurate stories so that we can see what we can’t possibly see. You know, we only have one life and we only can meet so many people and hear so many things ourselves. We rely on journalism to tell us what’s going on and keep us informed. So truth is paramount. Truth is everything. We’ve got to seek truth as journalists. But we also need to make sure that our society, that the public is capable of collectively searching for truth itself.

And that’s where trust comes in. Right now we know that, boy, it’s abysmal, the amount of trust that the American public has in media, in mainstream media, I should say, because media is not a monolith. And there’s all kinds of independent content creators that have been building a ton of trust with their own audiences, right? But the dearth of spaces in media that consider it part of their mission to welcome and reflect many perspectives and put them into conversation in one arena. That’s a real weakness right now. That’s a real weakness. So we’ve got to work on that. Now, what I would say to journalists is I think that we have overvalued truth at the expense of trust. And let me give you an example. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So as an example, if I am, and I’ve done this many times, doing a live interview, you one-on-one live interview with a…

Eric Schurenberg (33:57.974)
Yeah, tell me more about that.

Monica (34:06.595)
…public figure, somebody with a lot in the public interest, and they say something that I know to be false. And it’s alive, there’s a public there, right? It is my responsibility to correct them in that moment, right? And say, hey, for our listeners, this is what’s, you know, the fact show that’s X, Y, and Z. That is my responsibility. That truth is out there. I’m the journalist. I need to do that. Now, if I’m in one-on-one conversation and I’m interviewing somebody about what they believe,

and there’s nobody else around. It’s a contained conversation. And I correct a person as soon as they say something that is incorrect as far as I know. I am actually hurting my ability to learn more about them and learn where their views come from. When you do that in real life, you know, with Uncle Bob or Cousin Sue or whoever it is, and you just spend your time correcting them because they don’t have truth or whatever, truth as you see it.

Let’s be humble, truth as you see it. Then they’re not gonna feel hurt by you. They’re gonna feel, if you do it too much, especially condescending to, you think you know everything, hang on. Okay, maybe I got that one thing wrong, but it was on my way to a bigger, deeper point that’s in my heart that doesn’t rely on a statistic. What’s in my heart is more real than that and more profound, and you’re not letting me get to it because you keep correcting me. In the book I talked about as I’ve grown up,

Boy, have I been annoyed with my mother because she cares so much about my not losing Spanish, the language, and making sure that I speak it well, that she still is in this habit, but we laugh about it, right? We are who we are. But she still is in this habit where if I say a word wrong or I use bad grammar, she’ll correct me immediately. Sometimes even when I’m saying something like emotional and important and she’s like, no, it’s this. I’m like, mom, shut up, you’re not listening to me. So that’s what I would tell journalists.

is make sure that you’re watching trust. Make sure that you’re respecting people. Make sure you’re giving them space. Not everyone is a researcher, investigator, seasoned communicator. Don’t use that as a cudgel against people, please. Don’t do that, because then you’re not going to able to do your job, which means our democratic republic can’t do its job. So don’t put truth as the king at the expense of building trust. Don’t do it.

Eric Schurenberg (36:30.518)
All right, good. Trust before truth. I can certainly buy that. Or maybe the two together. Trust is the path to truth. Leave us, if you don’t mind, Monica, with one piece of advice. What should you be thinking? How do you rein yourself in when you are confronting someone whose beliefs, who someone that you can’t understand, someone who’s just made a statement that you can’t stomach?

How do you get to that point where you can actually have a constructive conversation with that person?

Monica (37:02.463)
Mmm, if you can’t stomach it, you know, how bad is it? Because if you are afraid, if dignity is burning, if it’s bad, get out of there. Find your exit. It’s not worth it. But if you can stay in the arena, if you can keep it out of simmer, the first thing to try is, you know, take a breath, sort of notice your reaction, and then make that choice. And if you can make the choice to be curious, ask them, how did you come to believe that? Can you tell me more about that?

and then make yourself listen without interruption. It’s really hard, really, really hard. Can you do it? Can you do it for one minute? How about two? Watch the gaps as they’ve come up in your brain. What do they mean by that? Does that mean this? They must be one of those people. Nope. Turn all of those assumptions into questions that you can then follow up on if you want. Or after two or three minutes, be like, okay, pass the salt and move on because the best conversation is the one you can keep having later.

Eric Schurenberg (38:02.19)
Let’s leave it there. That is a great piece of advice. The best conversation is one that you can have later. Monica Guzman, thank you for being on In Reality. This was a great conversation. And thank you for the work you do.

Monica (38:13.795)
Thank you, Eric. Yeah, you bet. Thanks for the questions. Good stuff.

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Feb 27 2025

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