Melissa Weintraub of Resetting the Table

Welcome to the Puck Venture Capital and Beyond, a show that examines the changing landscape of our world. We'll have candid conversations with VCs, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders grappling with our current challenges and providing solutions to key problems we face as a nation. I'm Jim Beer, president of CMBG Advisors. This podcast brings change makers to the table to discover the inner workings behind their decision making strategies and ultimately to how they got to where they are today. There is a wealth of research that shows that the more people feel that who they are is truly seen by others, the more they feel a sense of ease and connection even in the face of strong disagreement and challenge.

So when people feel seen as they see themselves, they are far more likely to be receptive. On this episode of The Puck, I get into a fascinating discussion with Melissa Weintraub, co founding executive director of Resetting the Table, an organization dedicated to building dialogue and deliberation across political divides. Our conversation moves from the early goals that led to forming Resetting the Table, how her team successfully works with people from across social and political divides, and where we as a nation can find common ground in a period that feels all too divisive. So Melissa Weintraub, welcome to the POC. I'm excited to hear about resetting the table and seeing where the conversation goes.

But before we jump in, why don't you tell us, Melissa, a little bit about your, background? Okay. Well, I'm so glad to be here. It's a pleasure to be here with you. So my professional roots and resetting the table's origins were focused on the Israeli Palestinian conflict.

I spent twenty five years working on that conflict. So how I got into bridge building and peace building work, there's, of course, many ways into that story. One piece of the story, I grew up a daughter of Jewish professionals with urban roots in a small town in the Midwest. That's very red, agricultural kind of Bible belt. There were many people praying for my soul growing up.

I like to think it did me some good. But I remember seeing a mock election in a classroom in my elementary school in which 22 students had voted for Reagan and one student had voted for Mondale. And I was very aware, even at a young age, at the age of nine, that for my extended family living in the Chicago area, that they were surrounded by an entirely different political landscape and reality. So I was aware from a young age of the kind of cultural and regional and ideological rifts and fault lines in The US because I was living them. I had a foot in different worlds.

I had real relationships and social connections and a kind of native fluency and disparate cultural and regional and ideological streams that have become only more siloed since then. And that gave me a kind of, you know, what I think of as bifocal vision, like simultaneously being an insider and an outsider wherever I am, I'm thinking about who's either not represented in that space or who's present but not coming to voice and what do they really think. So these sensibilities and experiences of living between worlds created the disposition of a bridger and in the bridging movement we often find people who have grown up in some way between worlds as a translator across them. So I created another organization before resetting the table that to this day remains one of the strongest bridges between global Jewry and Palestinians. And resetting the tables work actually also initially focused on that conflict and building a different kind of political argument across the political spectrum among third parties engaging with that conflict from here.

And then in 2016, I had a wake up call like many other people, including those doing international peace building that our own country was degenerating into intractable conflict and even the risk of political violence and that we needed to bring our toolkit home. I needed to bring my toolkit home. And so our work in 2017 took a pivot and began also tackling political divides in The US. Is there anything you'd like to chat about in terms of the beginning of resetting the table and what it was born of? Sure.

Resetting the table grew out of a couple of different insights. One was that we needed peace building within the Jewish people, within the Palestinian people, among American Christians engaging with this conflict as conservatives and progressives. That that kind of internal peace building was as much going to be a part of transforming the Israeli Palestinian conflict as the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians. So I was born in that insight and really as someone who also was shuttling between worlds around that conflict, seeing that people were holding essential parts of the picture who were fixated with each other but had almost no contact with each other's actual lived experiences and humanity, and just the realities that each other was living in and the things that were most important to each other. And so I am often moved by that sense of trying to get people out of their silos to have the collective insight that they need, the more comprehensive understanding of the picture to be able to solve the problems that we face, the impasses that we confront.

So those were resetting the tables origins, trying to produce a different kind of argument where people who are in their echo chambers could push and challenge each other and impact each other's thinking and connect to each other as well across differences and develop a more comprehensive understanding of the conflict. So is a reaching across the differences resetting the tables mission? In a sense, reaching across the differences is the mission and the outcomes that ensue from honoring and investigating those differences. So the way that we state our mission is that we are equipping leaders and communities with tools to address entrenched political divisions in American life and to transform our political disagreements into a source of strengthened relationship, creative problem solving, and collective insight. And so if you're gonna bring that down from 30,000 feet, what would you say resetting the table actually does?

We divide our work into what we call our air game and our ground game. So the ground game is often about getting people with opposing viewpoints or unlikely suspects or communities that are fragmented in intention into rooms together, even if it's on Zoom, with skilled facilitators who can help them connect to each other across their differences, build their capacity for exploring their differences in ways that yield strength and connection and collaboration and insight. Air Game is about scaling the outcomes we get from our ground game without needing a facilitator in every room, and it is about creating content like films that can help people to step into each other's worlds, take proxy journeys through the characters that are depicted, come into empathy for people who are very different from themselves without needing to, again, be around a table with those people, but by watching them on a screen or watching others do this kind of work and getting inspired to want to do it themselves. So our ground game focuses on a few target audiences in that work because we can't work with everybody in a room, audience is everything, and the key target audiences that we have chosen in terms of how we're positioned to have impact and where our methodology is best suited are faith leaders.

We work a lot with faith leaders and entertainment industry professionals and journalists. So we think of those three groups as societal norm shapers. Sure. They're not the only societal norm shapers. Business leaders and philanthropists also play a role of societal norm shaping, and others do as well, but those are our primary audiences.

People who have the social capital to meet people where they are, where they gather, to be trusted messengers, to shape how people think and how they behave, and the storylines that we hold about each other. So talking about it from the air game, I was particularly intrigued by the documentary you did called Purple, where you had a group of people from both sides of the political spectrum, and how you navigated a discussion in an effort to bring greater understanding among people. Can you tell us a little bit about that project and how it came about and what you learned from it? Sure. So in 2017, Resetting the Table went to rural Wisconsin and Iowa, which is the area where the film is shot.

We spent six weeks in this area, and this is a politically pivotal area. If you look at a map of the counties that swung Obama to Trump in 2016, almost all of them are concentrated in this region. That's a swing that stuck in the twenty twenty presidential election. The New Yorker did a piece recently that calls this area one of the the tipping points of the tipping point in both national and statewide elections. So in 2017, we did a listening campaign there of three thirty interviews and a series of dialogue forums with school teachers and veterans, small business owners, dairy farmers, manure consultants, auto mechanics, every persuasion of pastor and priest.

And we immersed in this area because we felt like it captured on a microcosmic level some of the divides and realignment that are happening in our country as a whole and certainly has political import for the country as a whole. We brought with us a team of 36 facilitators and interns many of whom are coming from deep blue enclaves like Brooklyn and Berkeley. It's no exaggeration to say that for many of them, the program felt about as much like a cultural exchange program as one taking place around the globe. One of our interns said something that's always stayed with me. She said, you know, I feel like I've spent my whole life being conditioned to react to caricatures of many of the perspectives I'm hearing rather than to the perspectives themselves, let alone the human beings behind them.

For us, the film project was germinated there because we see the growing perception gaps in our country, not just mutual incomprehension, but increasingly mutual vilification, if not dehumanization, as bringing us to a precipice of real danger. And if history is any suggestion, if my life experience working on armed conflict, violent conflict is any suggestion, when societies get to the point where huge factions see one another in their gut as other an enemy and as so dangerous, repellent, and evil that they think there's no talking to them. They simply must be vanquished. That has a tendency to breed all kinds of harm, including outright violence. So we knew we couldn't bring everyone across the country, even pre COVID, but film can be a great tool for taking vicarious journeys, for getting us out of our like minded enclaves, and allowing us to cross psychic distances of background and viewpoint, and giving us a a little window into what it's like to be other people who aren't already part of our world.

What are some practical approaches that our listeners can kinda use to navigate the political differences in their work and in their lives? So I'll share one foundational building block of collaborative communication on contentious issues that we teach again and again. That's a skill that we call bull's eye reflections. It sometimes goes by the name of mirroring, and it's an effort to show people we see them as they wish to be seen. We see them as they see themselves.

So we're showing people we understand them as they wish to be understood, not as the endpoint of conversation, but as the kind of gateway into it, as the foundation for productive communication that's maximizing the likelihood that any outcome that we might be seeking in that conversation is going to be achieved. You know, whether we're coming into that conversation because we want to heal a relationship or we want to stay in relationship with someone we care about and we can't avoid the hard stuff or because we think we have something to learn here or because we wanna be persuasive. We wanna change their mind. We wanna have an impact on their thinking. All of that is going to be maximized by the person that we're talking to feeling that we get them on their terms and we've shown them that we do.

So in a conversation, this can sound a bit like, let me see if I get it. You know, for you, it's this and this and this. Did I get that right? It's not a formula. The point is to convey and to demonstrate that we understand, that we've heard people.

To get to the point that they would kind of lean forward in their chair and say, that's it. No. Exactly. That's me. We call that hitting the bull's eye.

When we hit the bull's eye, we capture the heart of what matters most to others. Why do we do this? There is a wealth of research that shows that the more people feel that who they are is truly seen by others, the more they feel a sense of ease and connection even in the face of strong disagreement and challenge. So when people feel seen as they see themselves, they are far more likely to be receptive and flexible and even generous with others where they might have found something threatening. They're far more likely to overcome confirmation bias, to take in challenges that they might otherwise be quick to dismiss or reject.

So hitting the bull's eye creates space for mutual receptivity, even in the face of strong differences. So that's how we think about it. It kind of transforms all the core tendencies of conflict, which make us dig in and become more self absorbed and rigid, and allows us to become instead more receptive, flexible, and generous. So when we're listening, we should hit the bull's eye. And then if you take that down in your own organization, how do you navigate real political or ideological differences within your own organization?

So our culture is one in which we are trying to proactively live not just what we preach, but what we put into the world. So every new person who joins our team, we spend time to find out what their formative life experiences have been that have shaped their political lens, their moral lens on the world through an exercise we call life maps. We do this exercise again and again as new people join our team, like, really coming into an understanding of people's texture, complexity, like what has shaped them. And we do a practice that we call asking following meaning questions, which essentially means like getting to the surface, excavating what most matters to this person. Not just whatever they've shared about their life experiences, but really drawing to the surface to expression what matters to them, and then making sure that it's rightly understood.

So this is something that we're doing proactively with every new person that joins our team, and then we're putting into practice another technique that we train our facilitators in, and that informs a lot of our work, which is something that we call naming differences. This draws from a school of mediation that informs our methodology called transformative mediation that I can talk more about, and I want to give credit where it's due. The practice essentially is about proactively being able to crystallize the heart of differences as soon as they arise. This is enormously preventative and disarming for differences remaining constructive and generative rather than surfacing in destructive ways. So crystalizing differences in a way that all parties to those differences would say, yeah, that's it.

You know, that's the difference between us, and that's me in relation to that difference. Interesting. So my understanding is that when people sit down with someone that has a different perspective, it can be more difficult and stressful than that person might have expected. Why is that? Yeah.

It's a great question. So I've I've alluded to some of the tendencies of conflict. Scholars and practitioners of conflict intervention have long observed that conflict produces three general tendencies, and this is both at interpersonal levels and kind of social, societal levels. So one of those tendencies is self absorption. When we're confronted with threat, we tend to get closed off and impervious to the experience of the person sitting before us, even if a moment before we were connected.

Even if we love that person very much, let alone if it's a stranger that we have no context for. We tend to get more rigid, so we dig in, we become the opposite of the receptive and flexible people that we are when we are most at ease. And conflict also produces experiences of weakness. This is what transformative mediation calls it. It's kind of counterintuitive because someone might be being reactive, even aggressive.

It doesn't look like weakness. But that's, you know, essentially a way of naming that even if our reactivity comes through confrontationally or adversarially or getting shut down, what many people are experiencing is a sense of being overwhelmed, you know, out of control, thrown off balance, stuck, like there's things happening in our nervous system that are leading to those outcomes. So we get essentially more self absorbed, more rigid, more reactive and overwhelmed. Not our best self. A lot of times people turn to the mediator not because they want help getting to yes.

Like, they're not asking, like, help me get to solutions exactly. They think that's what they're asking, but really what they're asking is help me get out of the ugly experience of being in conflict so that we can solve our own problems and figure out how we can get to a better resolution. So when a person does get triggered, I mean, what can people do to be more successful at this? Yeah. So the practice that I described earlier, the bull's eye reflections are really the single fundamental building block we have found that allows people to shift from self absorption to connection, to feel more connected to each other again.

Oh, you see me. You wanna see me. You see me on my terms. To move from that rigidity back into receptivity. Okay.

I can relax. You're not a threat to me. You wanna understand me minimally. You wanna understand me, and you do understand me. And to move from that weakness back into a kind of empowerment and centeredness.

The practice of bull's eye reflections is the one that we teach over and over again because it's kind of the magic. I mean, there's a lot of other practices that we teach our facilitators to make, But what leads to the moments of escalation often are people feeling mischaracterized and misseen, talking around and talking past each other, saying over and over to each other, whatever they're saying, what's underneath it is you don't get it, no you don't get it, no you don't get it, and you're not seeing me right. So those are the things that provide the kindling for things kind of going off the rails. And when we are doing what I described a moment ago, following the meaning, you know, getting what matters most to us onto the table and making sure that what matters most to us is rightly understood and that we're conveying our intentions, I really wanna understand you. And when we're naming our differences proactively in ways that capture each of us, it is just enormously preventative and also diffusing of tense moments.

And when people go into these conversations, from their perspective, it sounds like they need to focus on using the bull's eye technique. Should people also suggest to the person they're talking with that they follow the same protocol? So we really put an emphasis on the act of listening as what will generate and maximize a likelihood that one is going to get it in response without any kind of preaching. Empathy draws out empathy. My curiosity will draw out your curiosity.

And my reactivity will also similarly draw out your reactivity. And so we are gonna get more empathy when we organically produce the conditions for it than when we request it explicitly or when we kind of preach for it. You know, if I tell you be empathic, you're less likely to be empathic than if I extend empathy to you and draw out your receptivity and, you know, you just relax into our interaction, you're gonna naturally be more empathic with me. That is what we train people in. One can, certainly, if one is not getting that effect, kind of do what we call creating an invitation.

And I have to say that for the bull's eye reflection, for that to work, for that technique to work, it can't be perfunctory. It can't be I just pair it back what you're saying. Right. I have to meet your intensity. I have to work at it.

I have to be correctable and wait till I get you to say exactly. This is why we train people in this because it sounds very simple, but it really can be swimming upstream when we actually are having a tense interaction, when we don't understand someone, when we're getting reactivity from them, and that's where it's most likely to work its magic, but we have to keep at it until someone says exactly. And then we can say, you know, I also want you to hear me. I want you to hear what I have to say about this. I see this differently.

You know, I have a different source of information, or I approach this situation differently, and I also wanna be understood. Makes sense. So as a rabbi, is there a theological religious basis for the work you do? Yeah. It's a beautiful question.

I know you have a lot to say about that as well, and maybe at some point in this conversation, we can make it more two way. Happy to. So there's a lot I could say about that. I know Kabbalah is something you also study. One of the beautiful Kabbalistic teachings that I think about in our work is that we have a a kind of mitzvah tayichud.

We have an obligation to unify. That which looks like it's contradictory. That which looks like it's opposing. That we aren't just to preach unity, but to actualize, to achieve a kind of unification in the face of the contradictions and opposing forces of the world. So that's one piece of what drives me.

I often think of this, like, really gorgeous line from the Yom Kippur liturgy. Yom Kippur is the day of atonement in Jewish tradition. And there's a line in the liturgy, Shafachnu kamayim Avneleboth. We have poured out our stone hearts like water. We talked about how conflict produces rigidity.

Like, you could think about conflict, particularly polarized conflict producing a kind of stony heart, like our hearts hardening in a sense. And I think one core piece of the religious life, and this is universal really, is that prayer and reflection are meant to support us and condition us to be able to pour out our stone hearts, you know, to in our families, in our communities, even potentially in relation to our societal counterparts, to be able to transform our rigidity into receptivity again and our capacity to be responsive to other people, to who they actually are, not our projection of who they are, not our fear of who they are, but to be able to take other people in again on their own terms where we might have been tempted to distort or shut down or dismiss. What I would say that I've struggled with is that religion is to me the most polarizing subject. I think of myself sometimes as like trying to be a non denominational preacher in that. I feel like people have to find themselves in the stories that inspire them.

How do you find yourself in these stories, and how are you inspired by Judaism when there is so much divisiveness even within our own religion? I'm interested in how you experience religion as polarizing when you say say that. Are you talking specifically about these kinds of internal rifts and divisions? I find that in conversation when you mention the g word, it shuts it down. So for instance, if you're talking to Christians and you use the g word, again, are you talking about Jesus?

Are you talking about Yahweh? When you talk about God to somebody who's transgender or gay, for instance, they ask, but where am I in the bible? You want me to read this book and consider it the word of God, and yet, last time I checked, there's not much room for me. I find it hard to bring people into that tent. There's a lot of things that I could say, you know, about this.

I will say, on this question, I'm speaking as Melissa, not as resetting the table because we really don't do dialogue on religion. We do dialogue and deliberation on political divides and on moral divides. You know, I think in some ways some of the same principles apply that I and we, like, want to invite people always to be finding their own voices and views and not to be imposing any belief system on them, but to be actually sparking their volunteerism, like them finding, this is what resonates with me, this is what doesn't, this is what I love, this is what I hate, and at the same time to be doing that in collaborative conversation with people who see things very differently than they do. Ultimately, that is my religion and this is also something that is grounded very Jewishly. I mean, in Jewish tradition, there are a lot of teachings that God's voice thundered at Sinai and 70 contradictory voices ensued, you know?

And I imagine that of those 70 contradictory voices, many of them, you know, denied the existence of God or just said, God doesn't resonate with me. And that language is just getting in the way of what I think is most important or what I think is most valuable or how I want to live my life and what I want to aspire to. So, you know, that kind of multiplicity and even contradiction is written into our very blueprint for meaning and truth and listening to people who disagree, who see things very differently as part and parcel in Jewish tradition of what it means to listen for the divine. And again, if that language is getting in the way, then let's not use that language. Like, it's really about what is of ultimate meaning and what is of ultimate concern to us and how do we live our best lives in service of something bigger than ourselves.

And in Jewish teaching, dogmatic certainty is a betrayal, really, of what it means to stand before the ultimate. That means that we have to proactively pursue and chase after the thinking of those who are different than us. It means we have to affirm and honor our differences rather than smoothing them over in the name of some kind of false or forced common ground. You know, it means investigating our differences courageously. I need to understand you.

I need to see how you see yourself in the world. You know, in terms of the textual piece, there's also a teaching in Jewish tradition, which means literally, like, turn it and turn it for everything is in it. It's a reference to how we read the text. Now you could say what that teaching means is we presume that the text is inerrant, as would be an evangelical approach to it. Like, everything's in scripture, right, intact.

A more kind of classical Jewish approach would say, well, we have to keep pushing the text and interrogating the text to allow it to adapt to the evolution of our thinking and our understanding of truth. The various pieces of what you said, I don't see myself in the text. There's just incredible feminist commentary emerging in this moment and all kinds of commentary emerging that is part of that process of continually renewing our approaches to the reading of text and finding ways of interpreting it that weren't there before. I think that's a beautiful answer. And I think when I find myself stumbling over is the complexity of it.

Because again, using Judaism as example, you have the written Torah and then you have the oral Torah, which was never to be written down. And as you talk about, there is this living commentary that you can find yourself in. And yet when you go back to the written Torah, without the commentary, there's a lot of black and white stories that people get stuck on. And how do you move them from that black and white approach to do, as you said, this evolving beautiful structure that's grown out of it? Yeah.

I think that Jewish tradition gives us a road map for that, in that the tradition is very much one that is always in conversation with the text, but not limited by what's sometimes called the black fire that's on the white fire. Right? Like, the black fire is the literal meaning of the words, and the white fire is the soul of the text that is continually being drawn into the world. And so there's another teaching that in any way that we are reading the text, we have to be reading the shot level, which is the simple level, the remez level, which is what's alluded to through the simple literal reading of the text, the drash level, which is even deeper, and the sod level, which is the secret of the text. There are so many teachings like this.

These teachings are as old as the Judaism that we practice, which is rabbinic Judaism. Like, these are the teachings of the Midrash, which is, you know, 2,000 years old. These are the teachings of much of Jewish tradition since that the literal level of the text is, in a sense, only the clothing on the body, which is on the soul, and what we need to do is penetrate into the inner meanings of the text. So that gives us a lot of license and leeway to continually work with the black and white of stories of what the text says and find new meanings. And to bring this back to where we started, we can have this desire to go speak with the other and magically connect.

And I think what you're saying is that it's work. It's not simple. And I guess my takeaway from what you just said about the different levels of study is that if we're going in and acting like it's gonna be simple, we're gonna be disappointed and we're gonna be surprised because it sounds like we have to do the work. We have to dig beneath the surface and really listen to the other person, listen to the text, and really understand beneath the clothing what's really going on inside that person. And not just be focused on what they're literally saying, but really what they are communicating on a much deeper level.

Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. We teach our facilitators that they shouldn't recount everything that was said, but they should capture what that person was trying to communicate. That's a muscle that needs to be built, and it's something that is a life's work of practice on some level.

Like, we never stop practicing this as practitioners. It's something that, you know, life gives us endless opportunities to practice. I am married to the person who is the primary architect of our methodology and is our cofounder and co director, runs our trainings. And he and I have opportunities to practice what we preach every day, you know. It never stops.

At the same time, these are muscles that can be built, and there's an element of, you know, just like in any form of exercise, you do the sit ups, you get stronger, you start seeing the payoff. And we really encourage people, especially as they are seeking mastery of this, even if they're coming from listening professions as therapists or mediators, let alone if they're not, just put this into practice in all of your interactions. Work to understand what are people really saying to excavate it, to capture it, to get feedback, to be correctable. Like, did I hit it? Is this right?

And you will get better and better at getting to the point, and this is where our facilitators eventually get to, that they can sit around a table with people who are coming from dramatically different places and be registering what's most important to all the people around the table and helping them to do that with each other. You know, it's interesting. You referred to and this is me taking you up on the issue of throwing my own 2¢ in this, but you referred to the 70 languages, so to speak, that came out from the oneness. There's an article in The Atlantic that Jonathan Haidt just wrote, And he was also interviewed on a couple of podcasts recently where he talked about the Tower Of Babel story. And he talked about how social media is leading us to speak in these languages where nobody hears each other.

So I started thinking about what was it that we were doing wrong in building the Tower Of Babel, and how could we bring that down to what are we doing wrong now that's leading to this Babel, so to speak? Any thoughts in terms of how you would take a modern day approach to the Tower of Babel story? I can respond to pieces of what you're saying. I don't know if it's a modern approach to the Babel story, but what that makes me think about is the ways that it becomes harder and harder to understand each other when we have no contact with each other, when we're retreating more and more into silos ideologically and geographically, when our entire media landscape reinforces our language and disparages the languages of others. And a piece of the puzzle is us, again, gaining fluency in each other's languages so that we can communicate with each other and push and challenge each other.

The point is not to pretend there are no differences, but the point is to make it possible for us to push and challenge each other productively again by speaking each other's languages. That makes total sense to me. And what I was wondering is, you know, when you say that they're building a tower up to God. Right? Going back to what I was saying that I have a hard time talking about this to people where they relate to it.

A lot of people don't believe in God, and they certainly don't understand what it means to build a tower up to God. But I wonder if one way to look at it from a modern perspective is that if we go into a conversation and we don't do the bull's eye, and we basically are going in there to prove to the other person that they should believe the way I believe, is that in a sense building a tower to God? Because what we're basically saying is that I know what the one truth is, and I'm gonna build that tower, so to speak. I'm gonna connect you to my way of thinking, which ultimately leads to the exact opposite result, which is we blow apart. But when I do, as you said, do the bull's eye approach, and I realized that you have a different subjective reality, and I'm now trying to see you, does that have the opposite effect?

I love what you're saying. So you're interpreting the tower as a kind of intellectual hubris and arrogance. Right? Like, we're just all assertion, this is what I think and I wanna persuade you of it as opposed to a receptivity to who you are. Yeah.

That, you know, I know best as opposed to an argument for the sake of heaven where I'm making room for your view of the world, Many Paths, One Truth, that as soon as I impose my narcissistic approach, and I think, you know, I need to save this person. Right? I need to get them to see the world the way I do it. That paradoxically, that has the opposite result. Yes.

I think what you're saying is very true that paradoxically, when we go into a a conversation wanting to hit someone over the head with a hammer, that is not gonna open them up, strangely enough. Right? Like, a friend of mine, Rabbi Benjamin Barnett, talks about how people need to open up on their own like flowers. Right? Like flowers open on their own.

They don't get open with a hammer. That said, we want to be reaching people who are passionate about what they think, who see other points of view as objectionable and are skeptical about this work and what it would mean to step into conversation with someone that they passionately disagree with if they see what they think as dangerous or objectionable, etcetera. One of the ways that we engage people who are strong, fierce activists and advocates, who we do want to reach, is by messaging that you don't need to leave what you think behind, and these techniques will help you to become more persuasive. So not just for strong advocates and activists, but in general, we don't think it's desirable or realistic for people to not want to change each other's minds or to change others' minds. Like, that is one of the things that brings people to the table for these conversations.

They want to stretch and impact others' thinking, and that's okay. The question is, how are they going to be effective? How are they going to frame what they have to say in a way that is most likely going to be taken in? And the most likely way that what they have to say is going to be taken in is if they have first taken the time to slow down and give recognition to another person's thinking. And ultimately, when we do that, then we're not just buttering someone up, but we have to, on some level, internalize how they see the world.

And so we have to accept that we too might be changed. This is actually straight out of the seven habits of effective people on some level. Right? Like he was onto something that when we want to be effective and persuasive, we need to first give recognition. I will also say about this that we often say to people that you don't need to actually have any doubt about what you're saying.

Kind of cut you know, like, we don't preach intellectual humility because we don't find that to be as effective as just teaching people the behavior of giving reflections. When people do the behavior, they often experience an attitudinal shift, or they just simply become more humble. But if we tell people be curious, be humble, don't be arrogant, that doesn't work as well as saying work to capture what that other person thinks until they say yes, exactly. And that then through that behavior, through that action, they will often begin to internalize the other person's point of view and become less certain potentially or at least, like, have a sense, I have much to learn, You know? Or what I thought about you might be wrong, minimally.

What I hear you saying is behavior changes attitude. Yes. So are we as polarized as some people believe we are? So there's a lot of research that demonstrates that when it comes to charged issues, we perceive ourselves to be more polarized than we actually are. This has been found on immigration, guns, taxation policy, a number of things.

Like, that we tend to perceive more polarization with respect to policy issues than actually exists, and that's a phenomenon that's known as false polarization. That said, the belief that we're more polarized than we actually are is part of the misperception, kind of meta perceptions of how we see the other and how we think that they see us that drive us even further apart. And so it's less about where we stand on the issues and it is about how we approach each other, how we see each other, because we are primarily exposed to stereotypes of opposing parties through media. We do work with journalists, and we kind of see the ways that journalists unwittingly, like, it's not because of malintent, but because of the way that they do their work and the ways that they take shortcuts, they often are feeding these kind of extreme stereotypes of who is on other sides in American life. So that's interesting because in terms of what's contributing to this, a lot of people are talking about how, oh, it's social media, and it's the algorithms, and it's the retweeting.

You're saying that there's even more I think, it sounds like you're saying there are more subtle and other contributing factors that we should be talking about. Absolutely. Yeah. There's many factors. Social media is one of them and the algorithm is part of the picture.

The factionalization of mass media is also absolutely a part of it, and we could talk more about that. You know, Walter Cronkite being replaced with MSNBC and Fox and the just the splintering of the media landscape and who watches what. To go back to what I was saying a moment ago about people only being exposed to stereotypes, one of the things that we've seen with journalists, because they are under so much time pressure to produce, to produce, to produce, they don't have time anymore to develop relationships with the people that they're depicting. So it used to be that journalists could be ethnographers on some level. Like, they could immerse in the communities that they were depicting.

They could build real relationships. They could listen to people in a different way. Now, they have to produce so much so quickly that they're often going to the loudest and most extreme voices. So if they're trying to understand why were some people opposed to government restrictions around COVID, they go to a shutdown protest and they interview the loudest person there because that's the shortcut. And they miss out on so much nuance.

They miss out on so many of the complexities of how people were relating to these issues and the tensions around them and how these issues were hitting them in their lives and what the restrictions cost them. And so then the rest of America doesn't ever get an accurate or textured understanding of why someone opposed those restrictions. The kind of faceless, undifferentiated mass at a Trump rally is another example of this, where that became the image of the Trump supporter for the people who weren't living in Trump's America, as opposed to understanding all of the different reasons and complexity of what drove people to support Trump. That makes sense. I heard something recently, and I wonder you mentioned Walter Cronkite.

It came down to a change in economic model, which was that at the time, most of us got our news from a few trusted sources. The economic model was advertising. And the advertising was trying to reach a broad group of Americans from the left and from the right. And so, there was a push to have the news be more fair and balanced from an economic perspective. In the new world, where you are much more in a subscription base, and you're also in a world where people will literally cancel their subscription or not tune in if that there's a tremendous bias towards telling people what they wanna hear so that you can build your audience.

Do you think that's part of the problem as well? Absolutely. Yes. This is an issue not only in terms of news media, but also in terms of story. You know, Hollywood storytelling.

We do some work in the entertainment industry, and there is, like, very much the shift in terms of what it even looks like to have market share, right, because there's just such a fragmentation around streaming services and like who consumes which stories and who people are trying to reach. And so there is like a lot of just these kind of self reinforcing dynamics of people only consuming that which they wanna hear. And there's a lot of people who are working on this problem and trying to figure out how we shift this societally. It sounds like a lot of the work that you're doing is getting people to have uncomfortable conversations, which is hearing the other perspective. So switching in the time we have left, when you talk about hosting workshops, for instance, how do you decide where you're going to focus?

The biggest driving factors for us are where do we think we can have outsized impact with the tools that we have. I mean, we're up against a lot, and so we are looking for those kind of high leverage points. We think that faith leaders have a really unique role to play in this moment because faith communities are like an endangered species in American life. It's one of the last places that that people, to some extent at least, come together with those who are ideologically different than they are and want to stay in sustained relationship. And at the level of values, it's a place that people want to be their best selves, aspiring and growing into their best selves, trusting faith leaders much more than they trust any elected official or the media, etcetera, as a source of information and a kind of aspirational ideal for how they wanna live.

And so that's one of the things that drives our decision making is looking at, okay, so who do we wanna reach? So faith leaders and faith communities are among the targets that we prioritize for these reasons. We do think that business leaders and workplaces, because they are also places that organically bring together people who are very different than each other, are another site where there could be transformative work that would take place, but it's not something that we have chosen to prioritize only because our resources can only go so far. And in terms of where we are most uniquely suited, we think it's with faith communities, journalists, and the entertainment industry. I'll go back a moment to what you were saying before about, like, we can each be having these conversations.

Like, that is one thing that each of us can do. Another thing that each of us can do is to be trying to, like, stir up the algorithm in social media. You know, like, it actually can get shifted pretty quickly just by intentionally following people that you disagree with. Building relationships, even if you don't have relationships in real life, but you want to cultivate those relationships online with someone who is in a very different stream of American life than you are ideologically, regionally, racially, in some way, and following them, friending them, etcetera. You know, this is something that I've done, and just by building relationships with conservative evangelicals, which once upon a time wasn't as much a part of my world, I started getting different advertisements.

I started getting, like, an entirely different feed than I'd had before. Very small interventions can shift us out of the bubbles that we're in if we adopt those practices. And, you know, I will say that in terms of resetting the table strategies, we want to be not just bringing people into conversation and encouraging them to be in conversation, but also the reason that we're working with the entertainment industry and journalists is because we think that they have a potential, like, incredible role to play in helping us to step out of the bubbles that we're in and see the world through each other's eyes. Because they are trusted messengers of sorts also, but them helping us, like someone who's become baffling to us, unintelligible, us being able to step into their point of view, see their humanity, see the world through their eyes. When you look at certain shows like The White Lotus or other shows that have been done, it would at least appear to me on on one level that these are shows that are trying to get us to either look at ourselves a little differently with a sense of humor or poking fun at us or otherwise making us think about things.

Is that what you mean when you say, meaning with these thought leaders is getting them to tell stories in a way that does get us to start to see other people and break down this dehumanizing effect that we are seemingly committed to? Yes. Absolutely. So we actually train Hollywood directors, showrunners, producers, writers in the same techniques that we train our facilitators. Because when they are trained to get at what really is driving and motivating disparate streams of American life, to make sure that it is rightly understood, to capture it on its own terms, to give bull's eye reflections to people that they profoundly disagree with, but really all the streams of American life, when they can capture and name the differences that are at the heart of our national conflicts and depict people who are engaging those conflicts in healthy ways, they can contribute to shifting polarization the way a mediator would, but at a mass scale.

So, you know, as an example, we had an Emmy award winning director in a recent workshop, and he said afterwards that he realized that he had always prided himself on depicting people he disagreed with empathically, but that really he was just showing why they were wrong. So this is how they came to the wrongful conclusions. These were the life experiences that led them to those fool headed ways of seeing things. And then he realized after our workshop that he could do better, that he could really depict them in three-dimensional ways on their own terms. That to do that, he had to do the work of being able to step into their lens and see the world as they see it.

And that that didn't change his disagreement with them, but that it did help them become much more relatable, reasonable, multidimensional, and that that could have an impact on the people who are consuming what he watches. There's a lot of precedent for the ways that this kind of societal storytelling can impact how we see each other. One of our inspirations in creating Purple, creating the short film that you referenced earlier, was the work of Search for Common Ground in war torn areas. Like, for example, they created a radio soap opera in Sierra Leone that 90% of the population ended up tuning into because radio soap opera is a medium that people embrace there, and it depicted people from different sides of the conflict in relationship with each other, in positive relationship, seeing each other, understanding each other's positions and motivations and concerns, having conflicts. The conflict doesn't go away, but doing it in ways that are healthy.

And they have a lot of data collection about how this actually shifted and help people achieve a kind of restoration of relationship, a peaceful relationship in the wake of conflict. Melissa, I find this very inspiring. And I guess one question I have for our audience is what would you suggest people do that want to get more involved? So I'll say at a high level that I often think about this wonderful TED talk by Nigerian author Chimamanda Adichie called The Danger of a Single Story, where she talks about the dignity robbing danger of talking about any group of people as if they are one thing and one thing only. At a high level, like, the number one thing that we need to be doing right now is prying open our own and other people's single stories about any other group of Americans, modeling that in our leadership, creating opportunities for people to disrupt their single stories of each other, getting out of our own echo chambers, pursuing, chasing after the thinking of those who are different than us, whether that's reading articles or pursuing relationship and doing our best to pursue the kind of the most generous, multi dimensional representations of other people's thinking that we don't yet understand.

In terms of immediate practical next steps, encourage people to check out Purple. You can find Purple on YouTube or on Resetting the Table's website at resettingthetable.org/purple. You can watch the film right there. There's a discussion guide that is available on our website that really walks through step by step how you can host a screening in your workplace, in your community, in your school, or encourage your community leaders to do so. It's a great and quick way for a large group of people to step into others' lenses, to see a group of Americans with opposing viewpoints doing so, and to practice the skills that I've talked about today, for people to practice bull's eye reflections in relation to the characters of the film.

What does each character think, and how do I capture them on their terms? And to name differences, how do they see the world differently in ways that they would all say, yes, that's it. We've worked with hundreds of communities who have brought this film to their community and built their hope and their capacity for doing their differences better. There is a whole kind of burgeoning ecosystem of initiatives now that are doing bridge building work. You can Google the Listen First project, the Listen First Coalition, and find many of those groups collected on that website.

You can go to Citizen Connect, of which collects a lot of the events that are happening day to day that individuals can plug into, or on demand content that can support you to do this kind of work and stretch yourself. You can find opportunities for programs that you can bring to your community or to your workplace and practitioners who can help you to do that work. So resetting the table is one of many initiatives, and we hope that you will be inspired to get involved in the bridge building space as a whole and to be modeling the kind of relationships, the healthy engagement across divides that our country and communities need. Melissa, that was wonderful. Thank you so, so much.

I hope our conversation continues. I find it inspiring and wanna help in any way we can to help you get the resetting the table message out there and help people. So thank you so, so much for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

The Puck Venture Capital Beyond is produced by CMG Advisors. If you enjoyed the conversation and haven't subscribed yet to the show, you can find us on iTunes, Apple Podcasts, and SoundCloud. Check us out on Instagram and Facebook and let us know what you think about the podcast.