Braver Angels

Yeah.

So I was a organizational consultant for 12 years, much to my shock, no training, but it was a, it was a great, uh, experience for me.

I was good at it.

I learned so much about how people work together and don't what a good leader looks like, uh, all the things, you know, and conflict communication, all the things.

And there's a lot of legion screenings.

Our impact producers have done a really wonderful job in their outreach to organizations like Braver Angels, which is sort of an organization dedicated to building bridges across the political divide.

and the American Legion, the National American Legion has been very supportive.

Cool.

That's right.

Before that, I've heard of your amazing work on Ebola, but then I think I was even more intrigued to see you at the Braver Angels conference.

Maybe we should talk a bit about what that is later.

And I started following some of your work.

So I think you've been to the Children Health Defense Conference.

That's right.

We've met at the Braver Angels Conference.

Maybe you'll tell us a bit more about that.

Outside of religion, outside of family tradition or cultural tradition, what is it we're fighting for and how do we develop these common human interests? One of the ways that she thought we do that is through talking, talking to each other, listening, and in talking, building a common world.

So I think one of the great experiments in that kind of talking is a group called Braver Angels, which we have David Lapp here as one of the founders of Braver Angels.

And while I could describe it, I think I'm going to let David tell us a little bit about what Braver Angels is and why he helped found it.

Yes.

Thank you, Roger.

Braver Angels was founded in 2016. during the midst of the intensity of the 2016 election.

And we knew that we were, it was really the brainchild of our first president, David Blankenhorn, and then Bill Doherty, one of our co-founders, and myself, and others, we helped to start it.

But it was really, the idea was, okay, so we've got growing political polarization in the U.S. for at least a couple of decades now.

If I can point to a few other groups that are doing this work, there's a huge group space of depolarization groups.

We just did an interview on our podcast called Your Undivided Attention with the Ambassadors for Braver Angels, which is a group that actually worked with the America in One Room project, and they bring people together to have depolarizing conversations.

They have a technique called the fishbowl, where basically if it's the Republicans, the Democrats, you have, say, it doesn't matter which side starts first.

The Democrats start first on the inside of the fishbowl.

You're listening to How Do We Fix It? I'm Richard Davies.

Every two weeks, we publish new episodes about the work of Braver Angels, their partners, as well as other groups who address what I think is the greatest crisis in America today: toxic polarization.

It's dividing us, angering us, and making much-needed progress on all kinds of problems so much harder to achieve.

I also write a Substack about this podcast and the ideas we mention.

And it'll automatically have this very special interface that has a conversation guide to structure it so people actually really hear each other, and it'll automatically be able to mismatch people so you can have diversity in your group.

So people can have and host conversations themselves with, you know, four to six people, or 40 to 60, or 400 to 600 people.

We've been friends for years, and most recently I saw you at the Braver Angels convention in Philadelphia, uh, at the start of the summer.

All Sides is collaborating with Braver Angels.

The audience at this gig were people who were there for the anniversary.

It wasn't a significant anniversary of Woodstock, but there's, they have an annual celebration, and they were there for that, and there was another group called Braver Angels that was, um, writing music at the same weekend.

Uh, and, uh, everybody loved, everybody loves my Back There Again song.

It takes them back.

Mm-hmm.

In fact, um, I was just thinking someone I need to connect you with is an organization called Braver Angels.

Are you aware of them?

Oh, I am.