Watch the episode here

 Listen to the podcast here

The world is more divided now than ever. Hard conversations are even harder to get into these days, and it is quite easy to get hostile to people who are not on your side. Corinna Bellizzi explores what it takes to heal these huge divides in society with Corey Nathan, host and producer of Talkin’ Politics & Religion Without Killin’ Each Other. Together, they discuss how to get centered with our values, ethics, and unique humanness to bridge the chasms in our political and religious spaces. Corey explains what it means to harden yourself in this age when fear-mongering and lying have become so commonplace, how to remain open and curious, and how to fix the brokenness of the world one degree at a time.

About Corey Nathan

Corey Nathan is the host and producer of “Talkin’ Politics & Religion Without Killin’ Each Other,” a podcast dedicated to bridging deep divides through honest, good-humored conversation. His path to this work is personal: raised in an observant Jewish household, he became a born-again Christian in his late 20s, navigating some of the hardest conversations imaginable with family and community. That experience became a calling. An entrepreneur with businesses ranging from executive search to the service sector to podcast production, Corey now focuses primarily on helping people across religious, political, and social divides actually listen to one another. His podcast is part of The Democracy Group, a network of shows working to repair civic culture.

Guest LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coreysnathan/

Guest Website: https://www.politicsandreligion.us

Guest Social:

https://www.instagram.com/coreysnathan

https://www.facebook.com/coreysnathan

https://www.youtube.com/@politicsandreligion

https://substack.com/@coreysnathan

Show Notes:

• 02:30 – The Costs Of Not Having Hard Conversations
• 16:26 – Bridging The Gap Of Religious Divides
• 21:22 – Preserving What Makes Us Uniquely Human
• 35:07 – Finding A Common Ground Despite Disagreements
• 42:56 – The Immense Power Of “Tell Me More”
• 54:05 – Approach Hard Topics One Degree At A Time
• 55:05 – Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words

BUILD A GREENER FUTURE with CARE MORE BE BETTER
Together, we planted 36,044 trees in 2025 through our partnership with ForestPlanet. We screamed past our goal of planting 20,000 trees thanks to subscribers like you!

  
NEW CAUSE PARTNER FOR 2025-2026 SELECTED!
If you value open dialogue, sustainability, and social equity, I invite you to support our new cause partner — Prescott College. To learn more about this effort and to support the show, visit: https://caremorebebetter.com/support/

 
Follow us on social media:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/caremorebebetter
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@caremorebebetter
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/caremorebebetter
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/CareMoreBeBetter
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/care-more-be-better

—

Finding Common Ground In Hard Conversations With Corey Nathan

Welcome, Regenerators. Each week, we explore the intersection of sustainability, justice, and regenerative thinking through conversations with leaders who are working to build a healthier future for people and planet. This conversation starts with a question that I actually think about often. What does it cost us as communities, as a society, as a civilization, when we lose the ability to talk to each other across our differences?

More importantly, what does it take to get that back? My guest has made it his life’s work to find out. Corey Nathan is the host and producer of Talkin’ Politics and Religion Without Killin’ Each Other, a podcast dedicated to bridging deep divides through honest, good-humored conversation. His path to this work is personal.

Raised in an observant Jewish household, he became a born-again Christian in his late twenties, navigating some of the hardest conversations imaginable with family and with community. That experience became a calling. An entrepreneur with a background spanning executive search, service, and podcast production, Corey is now part of the Democracy Group, a network of shows working to repair civic culture one conversation at a time. Let us do that with him.

—

Corey, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Corinna. It is a real honor to be with you. How are you doing?

I am good. Every day throws new challenges at you sometimes. As we were just talking about before we got started, I got dinged with a possible copyright violation for an image my podcast team used on a blog page. I will figure that out. These are some of the things that we have to deal with, the monkey wrenches in the spokes of life, right?

That is right. You are parents. If you think that you have it all figured out every moment and every day, life will throw another curveball at you, as you say.

You will learn soon enough that you do not. They will keep you honest, right?

I was talking about it with a friend of mine yesterday, and he has kids. I think your kids are eight and eleven. Is that right?

Yes.

His kids are about that golden era between post-diaper but pre-adolescence. He is like, “I still do not. I thought this would be the golden time.” I am like, “No, man, it is like going out in the ocean and thinking you can control the waves.” No, the wave is just what it is. You have got to ride that wave.

The Costs Of Not Having Hard Conversations

The ocean is forever keeping you on your toes, so is parenthood. That is right. Now, as we get started, I wanted to talk about the personal cost of hard conversations and perhaps even the cost of not having them. Let us talk first about when you converted in your late twenties. What did navigating that challenge in particular teach you?

That is an interesting way to ask that question. It taught me a lot about my own limitations. It taught me about the difference between engaging with contentiousness, specifically an agenda to convince, versus a different sort of disposition. I have to give it, my dad was the one that I had the hardest conversation, the hardest and the longest conversation with, about this whole thing. To this day, he is Orthodox, wears a yarmulke, goes to shul, keeps kosher, the whole thing. For him, it was not just the religious thing. It was filial. It was historic. It was political.

There were so many emotions. There are so many layers of this betrayal that he feels. Despite that, he came to a conclusion years later and articulated that his relationship with his son, me, was more important than anything else. It taught me that, as opposed to going into a conversation with this agenda to convince or to win the debate or something like that, when one puts a relationship first, there is so much else that can be overcome. Does that make sense?

I think so. Yet in times like today, many parents and children are not speaking purely over politics. It does not have to be quite as entrenched a belief, even as religion, for people to have a harder time bridging that divide. What advice might you give those individuals?

There is a lot to consider there. One is that we have to be vigilant about understanding our own limitations and proclivities. In my case, I just talked about an impulse to go towards contentiousness and to convince and to win, or however that looked. It was a combat in a way. Sometimes it was not necessarily heated, but I was definitely approaching it with a contest-type mentality. Those were my own proclivities. At other times, it is not that. It is sensitivities to certain things that people can say or do, or a way that they can approach me, that just absolutely trigger me.

We have to be vigilant about understanding our own limitations and proclivities.

To this day, even though I have been doing this work and working on this stuff for years, decades even, I still lose my crap. I just go off the rails. When that happens, it is not a moment to just throw in the towel and give up on this because the mission is bigger than just my day-to-day desire to bridge divides or nurture relationships or be a part of this larger civic renewal movement that is happening, that is way bigger than me or any conversations that I am having. I do not throw in the towel if I completely fail on a given day. It is an opportunity for me to look at it and say, “What was that?”

It is a real trigger point for me, for example, when I realize that somebody is not asking me questions in good faith. They are asking me questions as an interrogation. That is a real big trigger point for me. Another big trigger point for me is when someone knows maybe one or two data points about me and then derives or crafts an entire narrative about me. Whether that is simply labeling me a certain political label, someone who knows my vote on Prop 50 here in California may label me MAGA, somebody who knows how I voted, and I am very public about how I voted in the last several presidential elections, might label me some liberal Marxist, whatever.

When that is happening, in a way, it is flattening my humanity. It is not just me. I know that I do that sometimes. I will see somebody wearing a red hat, and I will create a whole story about that person. When it happens to me, it does not allow me to be human in a way. It just flattens me into a two-dimensional caricature. It is also instructive because it tells me what I might be able to do with someone else.

Just that last example of making sure that I am allowing for someone, for their entire humanity to be before me, is a huge icebreaker. Regardless of how they may have voted for president or certain propositions or various preferences of where they are getting their news, I am still looking at another human being. If all I can do is really see that person and hear that person, if nothing else, just that sense of being heard is a good start. It is a good foundation to have much more productive conversations.

I feel like what you are talking about is resisting the impulse to harden yourself, if that makes sense. There is a version of this experience of trying to build bridges that can harden you, that can make you defensive and combative at times, because you simply get tired of it. What did change in you? How did you change in the process?

The way you say it sounds like it is a done deal, like what changed? I would say more accurately, what is changing. We are all in formation, and it is a natural gravitational pull to get hardened as you just described, building bridges or the work that you do. I am fascinated by the way. I would love to read your PhD that you are working on. I think it is called sustainability education. Is that along the right line?

The PhD is in sustainability education, but it is a really broad field. I am not an educator, so I am coming at the work from more of a business perspective and a communications perspective. How do we as a society ultimately communicate the things around our sustainability? How do we, as companies and brands that desire a more sustainable future, work towards something where we take less and give more? How do we communicate that?

How do we really bring the story into our being so that it is not performative, so that the goals ultimately get replicated throughout the company, not just in one little silo? That is really what I am doing. It is complicated. You have to take into account a lot of different perspectives and what is said out in the world versus what is said in private, and look for whether or not there is agreement between those two things.

I am mentioning all of this because, in a way, I think it is also how we engage with our beliefs. People may say one thing in an outward capacity, whereas they may hold another truth privately. The biggest challenge I think we face now in bridging gaps is that we are in a world where identity and politics have seemingly become interwoven. People worry about how they will be perceived. In their community, in the space that they inhabit, I am a victim of this as well.

Why do I put blue in my hair? I joke that it is because I do not want anyone to have to guess about my politics. They might make certain assumptions about me, like I am some blue-haired liberal leftist lesbian or something. Give me all the L’s. I do not care. If you are going to mistake me for a lesbian, that is not an insult either. Sexuality to me should never be an insult. That is also my politics, right?

Yeah. There is so much gold in what you just said there, Corinna. Some of it I could just take. These things are valuable. Some of the phrases that you just packed in there I could take and use almost as little compasses to point me in the right direction. The idea of taking less, giving more, more sustainable future. If that is conceptually what I am orienting myself towards, these are great compasses. I can also tell if I am resonating with you, even at all. I also sense that it requires moral imagination for you to imagine what we can move towards as a society.

Inherent, you are going to get me emotional before we get started here. First, my oldest kid would absolutely love you. In fact, Sav is the one who first introduced me to your work and then reached out to you. It makes sense. Sav absolutely is enamored with the work that you are doing and the conversations that you are curating. It is just wonderful. What I have learned about Sav is that they are an idealist in all the most wonderful ways.

Being an idealist, you have this imagination for what we can be, for a more ideal future. On any given day, at any given moment, the degree to which we mess it up, like on a moment-to-moment basis, just breaks Sav’s heart. It breaks their heart. They process that on every human level, emotionally, mentally, spiritually. Going through that, that is why we use the word hardened. Yes, of course, we get hardened. Some of that is necessary. We sometimes need an emotional exoskeleton just to move through the world, but allowing for moments of vulnerability, creating space for others to be vulnerable, and making sure that it is safe.

Even if we do not agree with that, I do not have to agree in this case with Sav or with you on every issue. We might have passionate disagreements, but throughout that, if the basic currency is “I see you, I hear you as a human being, as a full human being,” and I respect you, there is a certain transcendent value that I hold for you as another human being. That is a good baseline for us to be able to have these hard conversations, right?

This is why I enjoy hosting conversations that are sometimes deeply entrenched in oppositional political beliefs to my own. There are certain core senses I have had about the world since I was a little kid that I just have not changed my point of view on. I probably never will. That is a sense of morality. For me to come at that from a perspective of somebody who has never been religious, who has never believed in God with a capital G, and to often hear throughout my life that religion is what it takes to develop a moral compass, or that if I do not believe in God or am not God-fearing, then there is not this innate ability to understand the difference between right and wrong. I think that belief by some is fundamentally flawed.

It is proven to be the case for me and many people I know who do not believe in God with a capital G, who may be spiritual, who may have their own sense of what life force essentially is. They might respect life force as a sort of God, but not in the sense of an organized religion. That does not make them wrong. That also does not make the people who believe in God with a capital G right or any one religion correct. I have always come at these perspectives as “you could be right in some way, and I can be right in some way.” They do not have to agree in order for us both to share around the same level of rightness, if that makes sense.

No, absolutely.

That is what allows me, in a way, to have a respectful conversation with people who do not agree with me on many things. One of the topics I touch on frequently on this podcast is regenerative agriculture. Often, people in that space are fairly right-leaning. Many who are doing the actual farming voted for Trump, and I am probably the most left-leaning person that they have ever talked to.

That we are able to have an intelligent conversation about something we mutually care about, I think, gives me hope. It is something that ultimately means that even if we have differences in how we see the world, there is more that we agree on than we might see on first blush to care about things like clean drinking water, clean air, and the ability to raise healthy children, and not be living downstream of some deluge of pesticides and chemicals that are going to damage our health.

All of those things matter to everybody. Yet we have politicized climate change. Why does that make sense? We want a livable world, and we care about a lot of the same things. How do we bridge these gaps and actually put the right pressure on politicians to enact changes that we are all going to be happy with? These are the questions I battle on a near-daily basis. I live in California, which is a pretty left-leaning space, really more centrist. People see us as being a really radical space to live in, but I think that is actually a lot less true than people think it is.

If you make the drive from me to you from the northern part of LA County to, I think you are in San Francisco, right?

I am in Santa Cruz, yeah, but of San Francisco, just a bit.

Whether we drive the 101 or the 5 one way or the other, we are driving through a lot of non-left-leaning parts of this state.

No, I know a lot of farmland too. A lot of farmland. Also, just a lot of working-class America. The medical centers, the colleges, and institutions that are in parts of the state that do not always vote blue, no matter who, let us put it that way.

You gave me a lot there, Corinna. I am thinking, man, this would be great if we were talking on our show because I could just platform some of what you just said.

Maybe we should repeat that. We will circle back on your show.

Bridging The Gap Of Religious Divides

That would be great. Let me just address some of what you said in terms of needing religion to be moral. Number one, if all we used was the most basic telling of history, religion would not come out too well in that case. We know this on a personal level. Today, some very prominent figures are very loudly proclaiming the name of God and religion and pretending to be religious, who are the most ungodly creatures, and it disgusts me.

On the other hand, I have made some really, really wonderful friends. Folks that I have known that I just happen to be now having these conversations with, who are atheists, or some more prominent folks like Jonathan Rauch. I do not know if you are familiar with his work, but Jonathan is an atheist, and he wrote The Constitution of Knowledge in 2021. He has written a lot of great contributions here. I have come to understand how Jonathan arrived at the notion that he is an atheist much more deeply.

He describes it as a set of glasses or a way to see the world, whether I am the one who cannot see color one way or the other. Somebody is colorblind, and somebody is not. He describes it much better than I just did, but we just have completely different ways of seeing the world. I cannot shake my belief in this concept of a creator entity. I have ultimately deferred to a particular set of scriptures and theological confessions.

That just happens to be how I have bridged some of the questions, at least for now, for me to. Not that I have figured out the ocean as we were talking about it before, but at least I have some sort of surfboard to surf through it. Whereas Jonathan cannot convince himself that it is an answer that is coherent with what he understands about the universe.

I think that difference is beautiful because when we talk about what is important and what is good, and we define good and define how to be good with each other and among each other, whether it is in our family, our community, our country, or what have you, we are going to articulate it in a lot of the same ways. He may have arrived at those conclusions through reading Locke and J.S. Mill, and these wonderful thinkers. I may have arrived at that primarily through the Judeo-Christian tradition and scriptures. One way or the other, I do not think it is a coincidence that we have arrived at a very similar set of propositions in terms of good and evil.

You have a similar rigidity to your belief systems. I honestly believe that people who are atheist and people who are religious in some capacity, where they have firm fixed ideas about the world and whether or not there is a spiritual component or a God figure, are actually quite similar in many ways. I see the world in a more fluid capacity. I think that is both harder because you do not have certainty. There is a comfort with a discomfort that I have had to become used to, if that makes sense.

It does make sense.

My husband is someone who is an atheist. He is sure there is no God. There is no divine hand in anything, essentially. To me, that seems like “how could you ever be so sure about anything?” in a way.

I really respect that because the security in uncertainty is a really hard tension to navigate, to hold. I am going to confess something here with you. I say I believe in God, and I do. I believe that there is this creator entity thing, and there are certain propositions in the scripture stories that I have come to say, “That makes sense.” Here is the thing. The thing that I really believe more so than whether there is a God or not is that if there is a God, I am not God.

The security in uncertainty is a hard tension to navigate and hold.

That is really the only thing that I actually believe. I do believe that there is a God, but I believe in a God almost as a buoy to hold onto or a mooring to hold onto so that I can construct other answers, or at least the beginning of answers that lead to the next set of questions. I have these questions that I have grappled with since I can remember thinking at all.

I can remember literally whether I was 3 or 4 or 5, I do not know, but I was a very little boy to be grappling with these issues of like, “Why is everyone so happy? Don’t they know that it is all useless and we are all going to die?” I was a precocious child. I do believe that. I just want to affirm the notion that some of the worst individuals in our culture right now are waving God as if it is their sports team’s banner and going even further than that, sort of shoving it in everyone’s face, the way that those who stormed the Capitol were using flagpoles as lances to gouge police officers. Now I am getting political.

How quickly we forget.

I have not forgotten.

Preserving What Makes Us Uniquely Human

Neither have I. What I want to say about this is that this is also part of what is uniquely human. Often, we talk about what is uniquely human as the great things. Certain things about humanity are really not great. One of them is that we have a short memory for pain, and that is both physical and emotional. It is what enables women to have a second or third child after the fact. Our memory of how painful that moment is is somewhat fleeting and is part of how we cope with life.

Especially those who have experienced post-traumatic stress and things along these lines, where you can get re-triggered. I say we because I put myself in that camp, and this is not necessarily a hardship, but it is almost like a numbness to those painful moments as a way to cope. It means that we are bad at remembering details in those cases. I can remember quite clearly a lot of what happened on January 6th, not just because I remember it as it was unfolding, but because I have been willing to revisit the topic. This is also part of how memory works.

To really, honestly continue to hold a truth like that, it is something you do have to revisit. If that content is being suppressed, how do you really revisit, if that makes sense? Your memory will not be perfect. We tend to write over the stories of our lives, too. If people have a hard time wanting to believe that they were unjust and trying to overthrow the existing government or what their role was or what the role of their peers was, then they are essentially rewriting history because they have not really truly revisited it, if that makes sense.

It does.

I have said “if that makes sense” like 6 or 7 times already. That is okay. These are the things I contemplate when it comes to politics, like what motivates us? Why are we the way we are? How do we move through the difficult moments, and how do we reach someone who does not agree with us to fix what might be broken? We need to focus on that. Perhaps you could comment on what is actually broken and why civility alone might not fix it.

There is a lot that is broken, and we could spend years literally talking about the different symptoms that have arisen. A lot of them are related, and that is seeing someone who has a different position as not just someone who you disagree with, but as someone who is an enemy, as a them, not as another human being who just happens to have arrived at a different conclusion, but as one of them. This has been festering for many years.

It is not the first time in history or culture that this has been the case. In recent history, a little less than 100 years ago, Carl Schmitt in Nazi Germany was developing and propagating this theory of us-versus-them political theory. For there to be an “us,” it necessitates a “them.” In that case, it was gypsies and homosexuals and Jews, and these groups that could be identified as part of the “them” that were causing all of the problems. Being able to capitalize on that quite literally.

Whatever your belief is, there are so many entities, whether it is social media companies or broadcast news entities or any number of other companies, that literally capitalize on the ability to make certain folks feel like part of a team and not only a team, but the good team, which necessitates identifying a general them as the other team and not just the other team, but bad and evil. They are able to build on that.

They are also able to divide and conquer in a way by appealing to base primal emotions like fear and anger, which fester hatred. It is a winning, I say winning, but winning formula from a pure, take any sense of morality out of it, from a pure bottom-line standpoint, just looking at money as a scoreboard, it is winning because they know they have seen that triggering those emotions also triggers literal chemical reactions that human beings have. I forgot the names of the different chemicals that we have.

Studies have been done on this, where it is literally the equivalent of taking a hit of crack that folks have when they get angry. “They did this, and they did that, and they are this way, and they are saying that is nitpicking.” Rush Limbaugh just absolutely perfected this starting in the late ‘80s and going into the ‘90s and Fox News. Now there is a whole media ecosystem around it. There is a whole industry around it where he would identify one person who did one stupid thing or said one crazy thing. He would use that as the proxy for “them,” in his case, liberals of the left.

“This is what they do by my book.” That was his whole program. He was really good at it, or I would say effective at it, rather than good. That is part of the problem. I cannot necessarily control that. If I stay and fester in the frustration of what Sean Hannity is saying on his damn podcast or Matt Walsh is saying and the evil that he is purveying, yes, I am going to walk around so endlessly frustrated. What I can do is have a conversation, and this is the hard part. Part of it is not being so hardened that I am going to be a product of what they are creating, what they are cultivating.

They are working to create an enraged, engaged audience.

Yes, absolutely.

That is really it.

I can be a mirror reflection of that, because it does piss me off, quite frankly. What I can do here is another hard part. I know that some people that I have had a relationship with for years and years and years, some of whom are in my own family, listen to Matt Walsh. It drives me crazy that they find that crap entertaining, let alone informative. If I am going to sit down with, say, someone in my family or someone that I care about that I have known my whole life, I would love to be able to persuade that person and do a complete turnaround and start listening to the cool stuff that I am listening to and agree with me on every issue. I am not going to be able to do that if I come at it with the same level of anger and hatred.

That just spurs its own. The offspring of those types of encounters is just more hatred, more contentiousness. If I do what we were talking about before, where I just, you actually hinted at what the prescription is, it’s a sense of curiosity. Getting underneath, “You seem to feel really strongly about that. Why is that?” It requires me to set aside that impulse. Like, “Dude, do you really think that what is happening in Iran is good?” Like, “Do you really think that that was even constitutional, number one, let alone the stated objectives?

Like, “Are there clear states? Are they going to move again today?” That stuff, I have that as an inner dialogue as I am talking to this person, but I have to kind of conquer that at least for now, because I am never going to get there if that person feels like I am attacking them. If that person feels like I am going to debate with them and try to prove them wrong, then it is just a stupid rhetorical ping-pong contest. Whereas if I can say, you do not have to pretend that you agree with them, but if I can sit there and say, “You seem to feel really strongly about that. Tell me about when you started feeling that way. That is an interesting position. It is not something that I hold, but I am curious when you started developing that position, when you started developing those views.”

If I can simply get there and open that person up, telling their story, who they are as a human being, then it gets to that point of them being seen, being heard. They are not just a person who thinks that Hegseth is the best thing since Rambo, but now I am hearing the bee’s knees, I do not know. It allows me to see that person just as that, as a person. You asked at the beginning about the cost. I would ask that person, the person I am thinking of, it is all about owning the libs. To that person, fingers have been wagging in his face, and he has been scolded, and he has been shamed because he happens to be Latino, the individual that I am thinking of.

He has so many people telling him, “You should think this way, and you should believe this, and you should be voting that.” He just got so tired of it that he developed this hardened, calloused view of the left. When he sees someone else who is a hero of his frustrations, he is going to come around that. Even setting aside what I know to be his deeper core values. He loves his wife. He loves his kids. He is great in the community. He is a fun guy to hang out with, but he happens to say some crap that is just nonsensical to me when it comes to the state of our country.

If I can see him as a human being and understand what has been happening to him for the better part of fifteen years, and being shamed and being canceled and being made to feel like his political incorrectness was unacceptable, that he cannot be in polite company, it just got to a boiling point with him. That is the cost. For me, the cost is being able to set aside what I know to be part of the core American idea, “What I hold these truths to be self-evident.” All men are created equal, all these basic tenets of what true conservatism is, as well as what liberalism is, a word that has sort of been hijacked, but like liberal ideals. I have to set aside, or just on a more basic level, my political views of, in this case, Hegseth.

My cost is setting that aside for now so that I can see him. What I am going to then ask him is, “Your main thing is you just want to own the libs.” That just happens to be the thing for him. Others, it might be immigration. Others, it might be the cost of living. I ask him, “You want to own the libs. You know there is a price to that, right? What is the cost? The price that you want to pay? Is it your own values? Is it the American ideals?

Is it the American experiment? Is it a constitutional democracy? Are you willing to pay that price? Are you willing to pay, sacrifice the price of constitutional democracy because that is what we are giving up right now?” That is, say, “Own the libs.” It costs something to own something. That is the price you are willing to pay. America itself, because that is what we are losing day by day. I am never going to get there if I am not at least open enough to hear his story. I do not know if I am making sense, if the illustrations and the connections I am drawing make any sense.

It is hard to have this conversation when you are talking about opposite poles. If somebody’s motivation is to “own the libs,” they are not likely to be somebody that you can truly build a bridge with unless something radical changes within. In my view, in cases like that, civility alone will not fix it, but you are not going to maintain a relationship unless you are willing to just avoid certain subjects with an individual who is that entrenched. I think that is true of people on the far left and also on the far right. Each believes that they are the only ones in the room who are right.

You were describing a dynamic earlier, where I think it was regenerative agriculture. You have what I think of as concentric circles with folks where the rest of their circle is very different than yours. There is still overlap in those circles, right? If you ever have an opportunity to talk with someone who maybe 90% of their circle is different than yours about anything else in the circle that does not overlap, the tendency is to, “Now, we are talking about it, right? Now, I have to convince them.” I am not saying this about you. I am just saying that what I find in thousands of conversations along these lines that I have had, that is the tendency because of that idealist thing.

I get it. I understand it. I appreciate it. I admire it. I have a bit of it. The idealist sees this person because this person is otherwise good, but they have this crazy belief. This is my opportunity, so I need to convince them now. The work itself is, “No, I am not going to convince this person to give up their own liberal priority.” You are also not really building a bridge with them if you are coming at it from the perspective of, “I am here to change their mind.” I also cannot build a bridge just by plopping a bridge down. I need to build a bridge one brick at a time.

You cannot build a bridge just by plopping a bridge down. You must work one brick at a time.

A lot of it is our language. If you hear people who are left of center say things like, “These people, they voted against their interests.” I have heard this, I do not know how many times, about farmers in particular, because they have lost so much in this administration. They did not believe they were voting against their interests. They thought they were absolutely voting with their interests.

The fact that they were lied to does not make it an easier pill to swallow, as they are losing the family farm, and it is being bought up by a bunch of oligarchs that are essentially privatizing theirs. What had been a generation’s family farm is now going to be under a large conglomerate farming mechanism, probably owned by Cargill. That is really sad. We can sit there all day long and admonish them and say, “You voted against your interests. Now you have reaped what you sowed.”

Finding A Common Ground Despite Disagreements

To use a farming term. I heard this too. “The chickens came home to roost. Now what do you do?” We are in a situation where so many people have been harmed by the fact that our government cares more for business than it does for its people. A lot of that can be said to be true from either side of the aisle. This is exactly why I think it is helpful in moments where you run into these deeper, entrenched discussions to have a conversation about something as simple as The Simpsons.

They make fun of our politics really on the nose. Each person looks almost exactly the same. They are saying almost exactly the same thing with the same meter and everything else. “I believe in everything except for what this guy believes,” basically. We get them into office and guess what? They do almost the same thing. We are outside of that now in bizarro land in many ways. However, that is absolutely how politicians talk to us for the most part. That is absolutely how they tend to act once they are in office, for the most part.

The funding that supports their campaigns comes from the same places, unfortunately. We have got a bit of a broken political system that encourages us to remain divisive, not to talk to one another, and not to listen to one another. Instead, pick out something like trans people in sports, which is a non-issue. It is a non-problem. We are talking about less than one-tenth of 1%. It is a non-issue that has been hyper-politicized. Litter boxes in classrooms. Kids are going home from school or getting picked up from school and getting sex changes without their parents’ knowledge.

This is not happening. These things are not happening. The fear-mongering and the lying became so commonplace that these issues became divisive wedges that pulled people apart from one another at a greater capacity than I had yet seen in my lifetime. Now we are in a spot where people who probably believe a lot of the same thing actually think that the other people are promoting. They want to say, “As leftist blue-haired liberals, we want for kids to be able to get sex changes in elementary school.”

What are you talking about? This is a non-issue. “We do not want sports to be fair. We want female boxers to confront anatomically male boxers who have more power in their punch and could essentially own them.” We will accuse women of being men because they are strong, and create another issue out of it. It is so frustrating because we are in a post-truth world right now, where it does not seem to matter if you have all the facts laid out straight in front of you. What matters is how you feel about an issue, more so, and what you are hearing about the issue, more so.

I venture to guess that one of the things that would be most healing for people in a family or across a divide, in a friend’s group, something like that, is to literally just force everybody to take time off of social media and off of all news outlets. Literally, do not pay attention to what is happening in Iran or in the news or on your social media feed for a week. Take a holiday. During that week, actually spend time with one another as opposed to talking about what is happening in the exterior world. Actually connect with the things that are real and happening in your life. See if there is enough common ground to make it worth it to fight for that.

As a step two, consider it like a speech and debate project that you would have in high school, where one person would have to go and research the opposing viewpoint and literally work to understand the other side, as opposed to coming from “This is what my politics are,” and just have a healthy conversation on the close of it where you argue one another’s points. I feel like if we were to go through this exercise on almost a nationwide perspective, we could initiate healing. It is a hope anyway. It is an idea I have had.

There are some good thinkers, leaders, and writers who are doing what you are talking about really well, and they get a lot of negative pushback for it. Jacqui Lewis from Middle Church comes to mind. She is an incredible faith leader who is able to articulate the views of folks who disagree with her in a way that gives credence to those beliefs. You know who else does this?

Thomas Chatterton Williams, writer for The Atlantic, did this in his book that came out last summer and got a lot of negative pushback for articulating some of the views that he disagreed with. When he articulated those in a way that really reflected that he understood those views, his critique of them was a constructive critique as opposed to just an argument. It is hard to do because we have our own disposition, our own leanings. It is like tasting something really bitter. We just do not want to do it. We are so opposed to some of these things.

I just worry that it is actually finding its way out of our skill set. I had to do this work in college. I have had to do it even as recently as my PhD. Find somebody with an opposing viewpoint to your own and give them this survey. Record your responses and talk about them in a paper format. What did you learn, and how are you seeing the world differently? Think about it. When we were asked to take speech and debate as a requirement in high school, I do not even think it is a requirement anymore. I would learn certain techniques.

Like “If I am hearing you correctly, what you are saying is,” or “What you believe is.” Active listening. Let us just say in the case of something like trans athletes and sports in high school, just as one. If I am hearing you correctly, what you are worried about is that students in your school, the women in your class who are competing in these sports, are going to be at an inherent disadvantage to the trans women who are competing alongside them. I also hear you are worried about how they are going to connect with one another in a locker room setting.

These are the sorts of challenges that would come up. What if neither of these things was actually a problem? If these problems were erased, would you still have an opposition to trans people competing in these sports? This individual, let us just say, has been on hormones for a year or two, and now they are starting to exhibit some physical changes. Would you want that person to be competing in the men’s sports and in the men’s locker room? If they are identifying as women, how do you feel about that? Tell me more.

Just really inviting people to share their thoughts and their viewpoints and their fears, and to look for a solution that could be inclusive. Tell me about a time when you experienced being discriminated against or bullied in your past. Did you ever feel like you did not belong? Can you tell me about that? Get people to think, to reflect, to understand what it would be like to be in that person’s shoes as you are having the conversation and say, “One of the things that people on the other side of the aisle, those liberals that you think are so terrible that you want to own, they’re really just trying to advocate for people who feel like they do notbelong anywhere.”

The Immense Power Of “Tell Me More”

How can we find a way to exist together? That is really the question that is being asked. What would you recommend then? What do you think we should do? Get people to actually talk because I do not think there is prejudice. Some people almost make it a point of pride to be prejudiced, but for many of us, I think part of it is coming from an earlier hurt in our own lives. When I had to live in this system, “You’ve got to buck up, buttercup. Suck it up, buttercup.” I have heard these things. Some are directed at me sometimes.

You just described in a much more articulate way what I have been trying to get at for a few minutes now. The way I would describe it is as opposed to trying to change somebody’s mind by 180 degrees. One degree is doing a lot more work than you think. The phrase that you just used is a wonderful tool to put in your toolbox. “Tell me more.” I will build on one of the issues that you just talked about because I have had an experience just like this.

I broke my own rule of connecting with someone one degree at a time, one relationship. There is a time to break that rule. When there are people, men in particular, in positions of authority that have been in that position for a long time, I have a lot fewer qualms about punching that dude in the throat. Not physically, but rhetorically. When I first became a Christian, I went to this church, the biggest church in Santa Clara, the valley that we live in. This dude, we are actually friendly, or we have been friendly.

I do not know if he still considers me a friend because I have been pretty harsh with him, but this dude just seems absolutely obsessed with this issue. Finally, one day we went out to lunch. I said, “Dave, you are absolutely obsessed with trans women in sports,” or however he was saying it was even more offensive the way he was saying it. I said, “Dave, let me freaking tell you something, man. More people are coming to your church every weekend that are either having suicidal ideations or tragically have committed suicide every weekend that are coming to your church than in the entire state of California and probably in the entire country.

If you want to be concerned about something, let us be concerned about something. This whole conversion therapy crap that you’re imposing on these kids, you are doing harm, my friends. You are harming.” In that instance, when it comes to somebody who has been marginalized personally or a group that has been marginalized historically, there are times when, in the Talking Politics Without Killing Each Other part, “No, I am coming after you, man.”

If you want to be concerned about something, let us be concerned about something.

Especially that dude in that position of authority, how long he has been there, and especially how wrong he is, and the harm that he is doing. I love Dr. King. I read him, and I process it. Yes, nonviolent resistance. Every once in a while, I just want to get up and punch somebody in the throat. That is an instance. However, 99.9% of the rest of the time, I am talking to an individual who can do the work that you just described by simply saying, “Tell me more.”

Getting them to relate to what it would be like to be that kid.

To be that person.

Just understand what it would be like to live in a skin that does not feel like your own.

Even if they cannot do that. Jonathan Rauch, he started working on legalizing gay marriage as early as the early 90s. One of his most effective tools was simply saying, “Do you know somebody who is gay? Are you related to somebody who is gay?” Even if they cannot identify directly, if they can identify somebody that they love.”Uncle Stan is gay, and I love him.” I use Uncle Stan all the time. Sometimes Uncle Stan is the MAGA guy that comes to Thanksgiving, and you just want to pour the gravy over his head.

Anyway, you know what I am talking about. The thing I want to drive home is two sides to this coin. One side is my own disposition. When I am entering into one of these conversations, I used to prepare and sort of rehearse on the way to that conversation by saying, “He is going to say this, and then I am going to say that,” and having all these comebacks. Now it is more of dispositional preparation. That disposition is arriving at a point where I can do what Mónica Guzmán talks about. “I never thought of it that way.”

I want to have an openness to understanding this person and this person’s story to where I can say, “I never thought of it that way,” because that makes me, not that I am going to be persuaded to ever vote for freaking Donald Trump. That will never happen. I can at least understand this person. That is one degree of openness that makes me that much more persuasive if I say, “Do you know somebody who is trans? Do you know parents who have a trans kid?” Just to open the door to that one degree.

Preparing myself to have an “I never thought of it that way” moment, as well as if a goal is to be persuasive, it is not to change somebody’s mind by 180 degrees in one conversation, but maybe by one degree. A lot of times, the work gets done one degree, one step, one brick at a time. That is the work. It might seem mundane, but there is an absolute sanctity in the mundane.

The sanctity in the mundane. I agree. I wanted to talk to you for a moment about being a part of the Democracy Group and what that means to you and the work that you are doing through this network, if you care to share it. I have one other question for you before we wrap.

That particular group is a group of podcasts, wonderful people doing wonderful work. We are all asking somewhat different questions, but all in that space of asking the question of what is broken in our democracy and what we can do to fix it. I will give you an example. A dear friend of mine, a lady named Liz Joyner, started The Village Square about twenty years ago. Her deal is more at the community level, where sometimes she does events where she shuts down downtown Tallahassee and sets up 100 coffee tables.

On one side is somebody who voted Republican, and on the other side is somebody who voted Democrat. She sets up just some basic ground rules, and off you go. We can have these conversations and get together as a community despite what hat you wear. She has been doing that work. “Republicans and Democrats will get along when pigs fly.” Her logo is a flying pig, and she is great. Others are doing it more like me, more at the local pub level, as opposed to the community level or national level.

I am trying to figure out how to do it at the local coffee shop or the local pub. Some are telling specific stories of what has been broken. Some approach it from a legal standpoint. It is a really great group of podcasts that are asking these questions publicly and inviting others in. As part of a larger movement, I refer to the civic renewal movement. There are academics, journalists, and even elected officials who are involved in this work.

To me, reading up on, touching base with, and developing and nurturing relationships with people that are in some way involved in this work, whether it is the folks at More in Common or Future Caucus, or Village Square, Braver Angels, just gives me encouragement that a lot of us are seeing what is broken in the world. Not only that, we are doing something about it, or trying our level best to do something about it. That is the Democracy Group.

That is fantastic. Another concept I just wanted to talk about briefly is with regard to the work of healing the world. When you reached out to come on the show, you referenced Tikkun Olam. I wanted you to share that concept of the world and why this podcast made you think of it.

Tikkun Olam, did Sav say that or did I say it? If Sav said it, just wonderful, but I probably did. I grew up Jewish. It is a Jewish word, it is a Hebrew word, Tikkun Olam. It is basically just that, asking the question of what is broken in the world and participating in healing it. It is not exclusively a religious concept because, as you pointed out, and it is absolutely true, some of the most effective work being done to heal our world is being done by non-religious folks. Some of these things I think of, as I mentioned the word compass before, you could think of it as like a coat hanger of sorts, like a moral coat hanger.

Sometimes I just need something to orient me in the right direction. Tikkun Olam is a Yiddish/Hebrew phrase. It is a concept that you are earnestly trying to assess what is broken in our world, whether that is the world closest to us in our own homes, our neighbors, our counties, our country, from the most intimate to the biggest picture. What is broken, and how can I participate just as one instrument in this grand orchestra to heal what is broken? That is Tikkun Olam.

I had no idea what it meant before receiving this. Thank you for that.

Corinna, you are doing it. You are doing it. Every conversation, your PhD, your work, you are doing it. You are absolutely doing it.

I am encouraged by you, I am encouraged by Sav. Now I feel like I need to bring them on and talk to them.

They love it. Absolutely. Sav lives up in Humboldt but is visiting this week. As soon as we hop off, I am going to tell Sav that you said that, and they are going to be thrilled.

If nothing else, we should arrange a call, and maybe I will hop on and just talk.

That would be great.

I also love to take recommendations from the community if there are topics that you feel like need more attention. Another thing I just want to mention is I am really leaning into this activism over the course of the next forever, probably, really healing our democracy. One of the podcasters and lifelong activists that I am going to be bringing on in July, Angela Glover Blackwell, is a co-founder of Black Panther.

She has a podcast called Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life. In just a couple of weeks here, I am going to be sharing an early episode from her first season of that podcast, then bringing her on, and then also sharing an episode from her new season. What she is doing is really focused on place-based activism, starting in Los Angeles, and then I think the next season is focused on Atlanta. She is really working to give people hope for how they can get involved and engaged and work to be part of the change they want to see.

She also had a prior podcast called Radical Imagination. That made me think of your comment on moral imagination at the beginning of our conversation. I frankly think everything comes back to the ethics that drive us. If we are committed to our moral code, like what we believe to be true about the world and how we want to live within and navigate it to be true to ourselves and our inner child, because we all have that, then we can find more common ground more easily. I hope that today we encourage people to at least try a little bit more and be a little bit more open and remain curious.

Curious over furious.

Instead of engaged and enraged, if we need to rhyme to make this come through. We do not want to be enraged and engaged. We want to be curious rather than furious.

That is right. That is awesome. I love it.

Thank you so much for joining me, Corey. This has been my absolute pleasure, and I would welcome coming on your show as well.

That would be a ton of fun, Corinna. Thank you so much for doing this. I am honored that you would include me in these conversations.

Approach Hard Topics One Degree At A Time

Is there a closing thought you would like to leave us with?

Curious? I cannot get curious, furious, or engaged and enraged out of my head now. Just be encouraged. It is so tempting to fall into a sense of daily despair, but we have been talking about ways that we can develop practices of overcoming our own calluses. Maybe do not start with the equivalent of a 300-pound bench press in terms of engaging with others we disagree with, but just one push-up, maybe the rhetorical equivalent of one push-up. Speak to somebody who voted differently on a proposition than you did, as opposed to the president. Just one degree at a time. That is the concept I want to lean into. It is a practice. It is not a solution where one shot is going to fix it all. It is a daily, moment-to-moment practice.

One step at a time, one foot in front of the other, right?

Yeah, that is right.

Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words

Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed today’s conversation. It is frankly my belief that being willing to sit with discomfort, willing to be uncomfortable, willing to lean into that discomfort while we listen and really try to see someone else’s perspective, we will uncover the innate wants, desires, core aspirations, really, of one another, the things that drive us all, and that we do have in common. Through finding that common ground, we can heal divides. We can heal great divides.

Perhaps you will not be bringing your racist Uncle Gary to Thanksgiving dinner quite yet, but you can move in a direction of being able to maintain that relationship and appreciate them for who they are without othering somebody into, let us just say, a non-existent world in your eye. As I close, I would also like to invite you to think about the things that you might do to live a little bit more hopeful each day. One of the things that I do is I pursue education. I frankly think that when I am curious and remain open, I also like to do things like read and learn about other perspectives.

One of the places I do that is through my work at Prescott College. I got to share my research just last week, as I am recording this through a regenerative lens, evaluating the impact of five purpose-driven organizations that are working to build a regenerative future. I got to share my expertise in the natural products industry and really give my why at the same time. I really do believe that if we get centered with our values and with our ethics, we can make more positive change in the world.

That is also true of companies when they are more ethically and values-driven. It takes work, but we are people and people make up companies and companies make up the things that we consume every day, from the coffee in my reusable cup here that has traveled the world with me to the salami I might pick up at the store for my kiddos. How many people’s hands touched that? What did that company do differently to make their product?

If I think about each of these things, I see the impacts that we have through all of our choices every day. One of my choices is in support of Prescott College as my cause partner for this year. I both pay them tuition, and I pay them $60 a month at a minimum to help support the institution’s ability to reach more people, to help educate the next generation, and to help people see that life can be more open and that we can all remain more curious.

My point here is that leading with purpose first is an endeavor. It is personal, it is professional, it could be scholastic. It could be anything that you really seek to make. These days, institutions like colleges are pretty much under attack if they remain so open and curious. If they want to foreground things like diversity, equity, and inclusion, they might need a little bit of extra love now, too.

I hope you will join me and consider making a small donation to Prescott College. Perhaps it is $60 a month, similar to me. You can find out more on my page to support them at CareMoreBeBetter.com/Support. Thank you, audiences, now and always, for being a part of this pod and this community, because together we really can do so much more. We can care more. We can be better. We can even reach across great divides from unlikely friendships and heal our differences. Thank you.

Important Links

• Talkin’ Politics and Religion Without Killin’ Each Other
• Corey Nathan on LinkedIn
• Corey Nathan on Instagram
• Corey Nathan on Facebook
• Talking’ Politics and Religion Without Killin’ Each Other on Youtube
• Corey Nathan on Substack
• The Constitution of Knowledge
• More in Common
• Future Caucus,
• Braver Angels
• Reimagining Democracy for a Good Life
• Support – Care More Be Better