Depolarization through Courageous Citizenship with Braver Angels CEO Maury Giles

[music] Hi, I'm Professor Brian Lowry and this is the leadership for society daring dialogues course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. In this quarter, we're tack tackling the challenges of leading in divisive times. How do we lead when disagreement is inevitable, stakes are high, and conflict avoidance is not an option? And today polarization clearly is not an abstract issue. It's present. We see it all the time in the headlines. And so that's what we're going to work on and talk about today with Mari Giles, the CEO of Braver Angels and the LA the largest nonprofit in the US focused on depolarization. Mari, welcome. >> Thank you so much, Brian. It's great to be able to be here and have this conversation. I'm I'm looking forward to it. >> Me, too. Me, too. So, can you start by telling us a little bit about your organization? give us a sense of its scale and and its goals. >> You bet and I appreciate the the the question. Um yeah, so Brave Angels was started nine years ago um almost 10. This is be 10th year, but it was after the Trump Clinton election and a group of of people got together and said, "Hey, could could we possibly get Clinton and Trump voters in the same room and have a discussion?" And so they did just that in South Lebanon, Ohio over a weekend. Actually, they did it over a couple of days and h and felt so compelled by the energy that was created in that room of seeing each other as people that they decided they wanted to scale it. And so they started they did a bus tour and they did other things and next thing you know one thing led to another and all of a sudden you've got a national organization that's that from a leadership perspective is we we were very disciplined on having and it's all volunteer-driven organization with the national staff but we have red and blue in other words lean conservative lean progressive and then in the middle from a leadership perspective we make sure that that that is represented at every level because if you're going to be like in our space of trying to be able to teach people how to have difficult conversations. You got to bring together people who have different perspectives. But we've really refined over the last six months. Uh I just came on six months ago as the new CEO. I was a volunteer for about five and a half years and completely shifted to come and I felt so passionate about this. But we've refined, we've synthesized what we've been doing over the last nine years and we've refined our vision and mission statement that we believe that what we're really about is we envision an America where courageous citizenship is the honored norm. And so it's really a culture change we have we're after. It's being able to recognize the most important role in the American experiment is us as members of the society. And our civic reflex to be able to do that right now is in great jeopardy because we had to talk to each other. And so our mission is to be able to inspire and equip Americans to practice courageous citizenship through skill building and and do that across political difference through skill building, convening and collaborative action. Now, we've grown to where we've we've touched a couple hundred thousand people over the years with variety of all the different workshops in our conventions and what have you, but we have an active group of about 80,000 who are followers of our content across the country. We have a membership base and these are people who donate a small amount of money and then and agree to be a part of it and they they create local alliances and that's 15,000 people that match that and they're they're across that. We have members in every state. We have 128 alliances in 43 states and those are like our local chapters and that's where they practice these methodologies that we put in place and then and that's run by about 3,000 of those 15,000 are active volunteers that are moderators, alliance chairs, organizers, uh you know run the systems that we do online or in person. And so that's what we're all about. But we we believe that we're at an import a very important inflection point as a country right now >> that we need to activate a big change on this whole area of our culture change. And the last thing I'll say is that one of our fastest growing programs is actually in higher ed with students. We have a thing called the college debate and discourse alliance that we started a few years back with ACT and the bridge USA and the three of our organizations run this program and we do discussions, dialogues and debates and common ground workshops with students at campuses all over the country and that's growing like crazy right now. >> Well, that's really interesting. I um I'm I'm curious about the concept of courageous citizenship. Can you say more about what what what constitutes courageous citizenship? >> It's a good question because we recognize that we're putting a new phrase out there and that it could be it could be co-opted by anybody. It could be saying running through on January 6th was create decisionship. That's not what we're talking about on either side, left or right. >> We're talking about a couple of things. Let me describe it this way. First, it's a recognition of your ownership of the one thing you can control. That's your agency to act instead of react. And so it takes courage to do that. Citizenship is a recognition that we're not we're not we understand in the current immigration debate as soon as I say citizenship that people may immediately go into legal status. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about a contributing member of society. And in this country the notion of courageous and citizenship on that is acknowledging that there are American ideals worthy of defense. And so making the choice to act in the health of those. And the thing that sits in the middle of those two is choosing to act together locally to solve problems or proactively create solutions at the hyperlocal level, which our alliances do. And the reason that's so important, Ryan, is that it presents an opportunity for people to have transformative experiences of realizing, wait a minute, I don't need to be looking at my elected officials as being on top. I should look at them as being on tap that I can take things and bring and work across difference to do that. The last thing I'll say about courageous citizenship, the most direct way I communicate about it right now is to say when conflict arises in society, you can show up with cowardice, meaning that you're going to just watch and ignore or not pay attention and move move beyond like you believe something, but you just don't want to stand up. Or you can show up with recklessness where you can go, I don't care about any consequences. I'm just going full boore with everything I believe to be true. We believe courageous citizenship is the sweet spot in the middle. It takes courage to be able to lead with your own perspective, but do it in a way that it starts by saying, "Tell me more about your perspective and your life experiences that shaped the way you looked at this." >> That's why we call it courageous citizenship. Owning that sweet spot between cowardice and recklessness. H so one of the things that clearly you're battling is this kind of partisanship especially right now this hyper hyperartisanship. Do you assume that um the partisanship is fueled by political commitments or more tribal commitments? By that I mean like there's ideas you can have differences in ideas about how things should be and the other one is like this is my group and it's my group versus the other group, right? And those are not exactly the same. I'm curious what you all assume about the nature of partisanship. Yeah. So I think ideologically there's been divide and polarization from the outset of you know the founders of framers of the declaration of independence framers of the constitution and that led to some people not liking each other and fighting and from but they they stayed focused on the debates of those ideological differences. Certainly factions emerged but today where we're in a very different place. It's not that polarization's never existed. It's always existed, but the toxicity of it has elevated on the partisan side of being about tribal warfare. Because if you look at the the way social media and the distribution of information exists today, there are very distinct incentives of the people that own that. I refer to them as the conflict entrepreneurs or the industrial outrage complex, right? that when you have an ad revenuebased model for the distribution of information then and I've worked with these companies did research with them consulting with them on what they're trying to do they spend all their effort on trying to understand how can I get you and me to pay attention to a feed of information and how can I extract your emotive response to different content why do they do that because they they need to sell advertising and if they sell advertising an advertiser is much more interested in not just who you are demographically but ideologic ally and emotionally. So you have that whole piece of it that has pushed partisan ideology into tribal labels that has said warfare matters. Now the warfare side of it I believe comes up on the political notion of the way our electoral process works and the domination of the two the two parties where you essentially have 7 to 9% in a lot of states controlling who we vote for in the general elections. Right? that also pushes to the extremes. So if you take partisan um labels, partisan primaries that push to the extremes of the parties in a social media world with ad revenue model, those all coales and together to create the dynamics we're seeing today where it is tribal warfare far more than it is about ideology. >> And [clears throat] so how do you address this in your workshops? So you mentioned these workshops that you do. How do how do they work and how do they start to combat this these issues? Yeah, we we really work through this theory of change and I I was alluding to it earlier, but being more explicit. It's got to start with a recognition that you when you feel that there's no hope and you have no control, that you do have control over the thing that matters most and that's your decision to act instead of react. So, we have a lot of workshops that start with depolarizing yourself. Recognizing and looking in the mirror to say, "Huh, how am I approaching difference and debate? Am I trying to score points and win an argument or am I trying to learn and then ultimately persuade and and in that process I love what um Rody George um was you know Robbie George Cornell S do these events together and they talk both sides he had mentioned professor and you know they're both professors in the Ivy League and he said we have to recognize that each one of us is fallible in our own in our own ideas and our minds we just don't know which ones they are but If you're closed with certainty that I'm not fallible, I have nothing wrong in the way I view the world, then there's never going to be a chance of having dialogue. But when you think and recognize that you do have fallibility, then your conversation becomes about learning and expressing and then maybe you'll learn and say, "Oh, maybe there's a different way of looking at that." But it's that personal level. So, we have workshops that start with polarizing yourself. Then it's about having conversations with different people. One of our most popular um offerings, you can go to our website at braverangels.org today and do it is one-on-one conversations. You can go in and select I want to talk to somebody at lives somewhere else in the country that has a different party affiliation or ideological framing or you can say I want to do a generational one. That's where we get a lot of college students that talk with, you know, gen Gen X or boomers. Or you can do someone that's rural versus urban. And then we have a group of volunteers that we have such a massive group of people that are wanting to do this that they pair you up and then they then they give you a a script, Brian, that is saying here's three conversations. Here's the here's the the rules of engagement and then here's the questions to ask and then people go through that. And so that's one of several dynamics that now introduce another person into the process who by design has difference than you. Then the next part is choosing to engage locally but to disagree accurately. And so it's really this idea of trying to pursue um determined truth seekers and courageous truth tellers. Again, I'm stealing from Robbie George in his language because I just heard him at an event recently and I think that's so powerful the way he articulated it. But the way we do it at Braver Angels is for example our debates. We have debates that are not about that they are parliamentarian rather than Oxford style. It's it's intended to be able to surface differences and get to accurate disagreement and then do it in a way that you learn. And this the most popular thing on campuses when we do these debates this way is that people recognize, wait a minute, I just said what I thought in my own words and nobody shot me down and I heard somebody else say something very different than me and that I don't agree with and I was okay. And learning how that happens in a debate setting is really important. But what we do after that is the transformative experience. We then say, "Okay, everyone who's involved in this debate, we're going to come back and do a series of common ground workshops." Another one of our tools. A common ground workshop is very different. Now, what we're trying to do is we're trying to get an equal number of say 8 to 10 people who believe one way on immigration, let's say, because we're doing these all over the country on immigration right now, as you might imagine, and 10 8 to 10 that are on the other side. And through a 3 to 5 hour workshop, they go through a series of activities that are all about starting with listening to hear another person's point of view, trying to find yourself in that person, and then going through and expressing your own view and the other side doing the same. And then you try to find values, concerns, and solutions that everybody in that room agrees with. And most people come into those thinking, man, we won't be able to find anything. And if we get time, I can tell you when I did this with elected officials at the state level, it's fascinating. But what happens is that when they go through that process, all of a sudden it's like, wow, we do agree on quite a bit. There's some that we don't agree at all. But if you can get to a foundation of what you agree on, especially if it's values and concerns, then you have a better chance to solve. And so that's that's the part. The last thing I'll say is we we then try to translate that to action. So we have a whole suite of offerings that's called citizen-led solutions. And it's basically saying take an issue at the local level. This could be something like homelessness in your area or it could be like in some examples a stop sign that's won and coming in a rural spot and there's huge debate over it. And what you do is you use these techniques to find people who think differently about it and then you go through a process of finding common solutions and then taking them to elected officials. But that's the action part of it and that's the biggest change from when we started to now, Brian, is that we're hearing from people that dialogue for dialogue sake alone is not enough. It needs to be serviceable toward getting action, taking action. But that's the way we do it. That's where our offerings come together. Does that make sense? >> That that makes complete sense. And one of the things that you you mentioned was coming to common ground. And obviously that can be hard, but you also talked about the incentives of the current eco media ecosystems. And one of the things that seems to arise in the current media ecosystem is um a divergence of facts. >> Yeah. We have no shared truth anymore at all. >> Right. So how do you how do you deal with um that that reality that people have different views on on on reality? Not just different opinions, but different beliefs about the state of the world. They're their factual inaccuracies. How do you how do you deal with those in these these situations? >> Yeah. So, we're trying to figure out how to do more strategic partnerships with other players that are working in synergistic lanes, if you will. If you think of the lanes of we're really hyperfocused on how do you train people to go through this process of self and interaction and local action, but in the process, we're recognizing that our alliances, they're trying to practice courageous citizenship. We're recognizing a big part of that is education. So, we're bringing in partners like allsides, allsides.com. If you haven't ever used that platform, any of the students have, you know, check it out. There's others like it. But what they essentially do is they take the stories of the day and they help you understand the profile, the basic orientation of that presentation of news. Does it come from the left? Does it come from the right? Does it come in the middle? And we believe if we can bring more of that education into our alliances, then we can help people. We're training them already to say disagree accurately. That means it requires you to challenge your own assumptions of facts to be able to try to find what is the truth. What really has what happened in that space. What you think about it may be different but there have to be some essence of getting to an injective set of facts of this happen this happen this happen which is increasingly more difficult and AI is just making it even more right which elevates the need for us to have a healthy skepticism of our own opinions that when you see something and this is what we're training our folks to do in some of our workshops that we're adding ecourses on this stuff as well that when you see something that all of a sudden makes you go yeah I knew that stop for a second and say, "Hold on. Let me see where that source came from." And then let me go see at somebody who might read that same way and say, "No way. I disagree with that." If you can approach your own biases that way with a healthy sense of skepticism and live not in the land of certainty, but be okay with uncertainty, then you're more likely to be media literate and understand, well, wait a minute. that little 10-second thing I saw on TikTok right now that looked horrible. In reality, maybe there's more that was going on. And so, the biggest cues that we try to help people recognize, if it elevates your emotion, and that's the emotive response goes right away, question it for a second. It doesn't mean you'll land in a place of not agreeing with it, but at least it gets you to pause and say, "Hold on, where's that coming from? Is it my echo chamber that's just intent intended to get me more and more upset? And if that's the case, then build into your everyday behaviors to read something that's different than you. Get out of your own eco. Set up a separate profile on on social media that you only look at. If you're if you're if your bend is is progressive, liberal, set up a separate profile that's always conservative and see what comes up on that feed. And if we but I firmly believe Ryan that the only way we are going to get enough momentum to demand systemic change in our legal and our policy is if enough of us look in the mirror and say wait a minute we're the ones buying this product. We're the ones giving into it and leving. Now it's not a level battlefield. I mean the tools they have and the money they have is massive but it's not going to change unless we ourselves demand different. And so I think it those are the kinds of things that we do. strategic partnerships to get more education in but then training people to pause, challenge your own perspectives and be comfortable with that. >> And so it's not easy. >> No, no. Which brings up the next question when you run these workshops and people are talking like what is the level of disagreement that is occurring in these workshops, right? Because if there's no disagreement, then there's no there's no need. But if it's too much, it's only you know there's maybe more heat than uh light. So h how do you how do you think about that? >> Well, the most effective of our workshops are when the work has been done ahead of time to make sure that the those participating have different points of view. If you're just bringing in all the same people that agree with you, there's a healthy channel for that and a healthy lane and it's called protesting, right? Like you get all of your own people, you all agree and you go do that. That that's a thing. But what we're talking about is you've got to bring in people who have different points of view. Second thing is you got to have rules of engagement that are enforced by by trained moderators. We we do it through volunteers, but there's a very robust training method to go through it. And what they do is they establish the ground rules of saying first off when you're expressing your opinion, you don't say it in contrast to somebody else's. That's hard for people to do in today's world. Most things that come out of people's mouth is attacking the other side. If you all of a sudden say, "Well, hold on a second. say what you believe, not what you disagree with what they believe. And it's a different dynamic when people start learning that. And so we find that one of the most effective ways to have that happen is through a fishbowl exercise. And the fishbowl is you literally when they're in person, you literally put one group on the inside who who tend to share the same perspective on an issue and then you have another group on the outside and and the outside group is observing and the inside group has a conversation where they start talking with each other about what they believe and why and and they express it. But again with those rules of engagement and then the the the task of the people on the outside of that circle is to then say what did you hear in there that surprised you either because you agree with it or it's significantly different than your viewpoint and then there's a discussion that happens and then the role reversal happens. The group on the outside goes on the end and the outside. When you go through that type of exercise, disagreement all of a sudden becomes perspective sharing so that you can then take to the next step of of trying to get to common ground if that if that's what the workshop is. When we have an exercise and this happens, this happens. It's it's easier to get progressive left-leaning people to want to be a part of civil discourse type work. It just sounds and feels more like, okay, let's talk and let's, you know, people that are this is a this is a very broad um stereotype, but we see it manifest. If you tend to be more rightle leaning and conservative, then the notion is well, I don't want to kumbaya and hold hands and just talk about stuff and have people tell me why I'm wrong. I want to like try to get to solutions. So what we found is if you get a group where is dominant where most people in that in that workshop agree with each other and there's not disagreement that emerges, we haven't really accomplished a lot. In fact, I've seen some times when either a full red or a full blue group is doing it, it can very quickly devolve into attacking the other side who's not present in the room. And that's the exact opposite of what our intent and that happens sometimes. Mhm. Isn't Isn't that how our political system is designed to work? >> Tell me more. um that leaders are motivated to um energize people who support them so they come out and there's not there's very little incentivism as far as I can tell maybe I'm wrong about this obviously that >> to produce um meaningful dialogue that could challenge the the positions that you as the leader are taking. Right? So what you're trying to do is rally people around a particular view and not to really engage in a productive way with outside views. >> Yeah. I I would say that the modern incentives are almost exclusively opposite of what we're trying to train. But I would also argue that the founding principles that Madison and Hamilton and Jefferson and Washington, they actually the incentives they were building into a system that had never be been seen before in the history of man mankind was the opposite. Those incentives were meant to get coalition building. No majority being able to to control or impact any minority and that and no minority being able to completely derail the process. But what's happened, I believe, is that over the years, especially the last 40 years, the electoral process and then the way Congress operates in DC has removed a lot of the incentives for the checks and balances that would incentivize coalition building and motivating different perspectives to come in. Because again, the power of coalition building is you have to get beyond your own base and get a few other people to agree with you. We've changed now to the 51%, you know, model of every election is an existential crisis. Therefore, you got to get we've got to get 51 or in the Senate, we got to get above that 60, the the, you know, in terms of the the filibuster. And it's like those elements were not the way the system was envisioned when it was created. If you read Madison in the in the Federalist Papers, his biggest response when people said this system won't work when we get big is he said no, it's the only one that will because it has built into it the incentives and structure to get diverse opinions to have robust robust debate. But if Congress isn't going to do its job, then the parties are going to be able to control the electoral process of who even shows up on November. and and then our ecosystem of media is going to be entirely driven off of money and advertising dollars. Then all the incentives are the opposite. >> We have to change that. >> And and this is um leads me to maybe one of my last questions. The >> situation right now >> is is intense in all sorts of ways, right? So you have things going on in the Middle East. You have obviously a lot with immigration going on right now here. you have um international politics that are in our backyard in Mexico and Canada and people have very very strong views about these things. Is this do you see this showing up in your work? Do you see this your work as being able to address the issues when they're as intense as they are right now? >> It's a really good question because we're having a lot of people we're having two things happen. We're having a lot of people come joining us right now and wanting to be a part of it. And we're having a lot of people who've been with us for a long time thinking, I don't know. I don't know if I can talk to the other side anymore because the stakes are too high and the intensity of what's going on, I'm so morally outraged about. Is this really what I should be doing? It's been a challenging thing to be able to figure out how to address because we have to remain disciplined as braver angels that our membership by design disagree with each other. That's the whole that's the whole purpose. So, we're focusing on the methods about how to get to collaborative solutions and common ground as opposed to advocating for one thing or another. We're we're being challenged almost on a daily basis by our own membership. Well, are you going to call out behaviors of elected officials or publishers that are doing things that are counter to what Ray Rage stands for? We've taken the approach on that side to say what we're going to do is we're not going to join the outrage cycle of condemnation, but what we are going to do is reward and promote the behaviors to manifest this in a positive way. So, we're trying to get hyper local letters, calls, and so forth to be able to raise the profile of elected officials who are doing things that are like this. We believe that that positive approach will further our mission better than going right into the outrage condemnation cycle. That in my own opinion is at least with the current administration that's a very effective tool that they leverage toward their objectives. They get other people to do their work for them by just getting everybody mad. I compare it to the way Dennis Rodman played basketball in the NBA. Like get in their head and then nobody could do their game. But there's another side of this that's really important that you raise and that is what about if I feel like I have to stand up for something that is wrong right now. you're sitting in Minneapolis right now. There's a lot of our members who think, "No, rule of law is important. We're we're enforcing immigration laws that have just haven't been enforced for all these years." But then a lot of people are like, "Well, but wait a minute, it doesn't seem very humane." And look at the collateral damage, deaths on the street. Um, and anything I write to our membership, I hear from people on either side saying, "You should have done, you should have." But where we try to stay on and we try to make clear on this, Bill Doherty shared this recently as an effort to try to explain our discipline as Brave Angels. He talked about it as in moments of social change in serious tense conflict, our methods when you get that high are not as effective in that moment of intense emotion because you're not at a place to be able to have conversation and engage. But in as a society, there are moments when resistance is a critical thing. Then there's replacement of of what you need to replace. And then there's repair. We believe that Braver Angels is squarely in the place of repair. And if you do it right, it will help influence on replace. Like what's the better way to do something? If you can repair the social fabric, we can replace what's currently inappropriate to to whoever feels that way in a more effective way. We are not in the resist space, but we're not telling people that they shouldn't stand that. That's an individual decision. If you feel like you need to resist, protest and standing up for what you believe in can be a very healthy approach. I think Martin Luther King and others over years demonstrated to us that nonviolent approach is far more effective that way. Seeing the tra the the the tragedies and having other people experience it as a way, but that's not what we're about. That's not what we're focused on. We're saying that, okay, if you can recognize that you have the agency to act instead of react, maybe your choice to act is to go on the resist play. Okay, do that. But if you want to do repair and influence repair to replace things, we've got methods that will help you do that. And it starts with you and the people in your neighborhood. Because that's the other big challenge that really drives a lot of this. We're pulled into national and international debates that we have very little influence on in our neighborhoods and in our communities, but yet they become the topics of city council meetings. And then the intensity you can't do anything else because that's the debate. Well, if we start owning more of it locally, we can shift that and we can start modeling courageous citizenship and then I believe our voting mechanism will change and then we can change some of these systemic incentives we've been talking about that are in play. >> And [clears throat] if if all those things don't happen, we're going to be on a path to being three countries. >> And that's not a good outcome in my opinion. >> Yeah. Yeah. I I was interested in the this um tripartite model of resist, replace, and repair. Do you think that as the circumstances shift, the priorities among those three things shift as well? They probably do and I think you're seeing it manifest on I mean look at what you could argue if the degree to which you feel there are positive signs but in my opinion there's positive signs in Minnesota with some changes that have happened administration of just having dialogue and just sending Tom H homeman out there and >> and and just talking to each other but also you know I don't think with with the mayor of Minneapolis a really difficult situation but some of that dialogue back and forth that wasn't getting anywhere either and so but Maybe maybe the resistance of things that you believe are are are morally wrong or or truly disruptive to society. Maybe as that becomes a priority in a particular time, it can trigger other things. >> But the challenge is doing it in a way that you don't condemn the humans and the fellow Americans who don't agree with you right in that moment. And that's the problem of the labeling and the othering and the absolute destruction of personal family relationships because oh you voted for this person but well you know what that vote was an assessment of that period of time of what I thought was the best thing to do. It wasn't a referendum on my character and my dignity and my worth. But we've elevated that in our society to say that and therefore we will cut off conversations because oh that's disruptive the way I feel. I got to do that. That's not healthy. that won't lead. When you stop talking, then that's when coercion or violence becomes the only solution and that's not a good solution. >> Well, one of the goals of this course is among the students to have small groupoup discussions where they really also tackle issues where they they might not agree um and in the facilitated context. So, I'm curious um this is my last question for you. What um advice would you give facilitators trying to produce that useful disagreement in a context that allows people to um hear each other and and grow from that interaction? Like what how do you make those conversations work? >> First, I think you need to have the courage to make sure that the right people are in the room. Don't just get all of your friends that agree with you and then try to claim that that's a discussion of differences. It's not. So there's a little bit of courage involved to bring in somebody that you think differently on something or you think you do and bring it in. Secondly, set up some ground rules that shift the dialogue to expressing your own view rather than attacking someone else's. It's not the same thing to say tell me what you think and your answer is I think these people are all idiots. You didn't tell me a single thing of what you believe when you said that. You just attacked a group of people and you labeled them. So set up as a facilitator the ground rules to say okay can we try that again can you say what you believe or what you're concerned about rather than attacking and labeling what the or you know describing the other person believe then the other one and this is the last one I would share with you because I think it's so the power is in its simplicity train people with the question there there's a there's someone that I read a lot and followed over the years Steven Cvy and his his habits of effective people one of them is is um seek first to understand then to understood. It's a great exercise and it's really hard because you have to ask yourself, am I really interested in understanding or am I just here to win to win some win an argument or to score points? If you're trying to win or score points, you're not going to have curiosity to understand because that's not your intent. So, you got to check yourself at the door to say, am I really here to try to understand? And one of the best questions if you decide you are ready to understand is to say when someone says something to you that just starts to get your blood boiling, instead of coming back with the retort that you probably have rehearsed before, instead ask this simple question, Brian, tell me more about your life experience that shapes the way you view that issue so I can understand that a little better. That simple question when done with real intent and received with intent is transformative because it's changed the whole conversation. Now it's not said you're you you still might feel I'm right and you're wrong, but it no longer is I'm good, you're evil. It's because we often think in fact I think we always think that people choose their opinions when in reality they experience their opinions far more than they choose them. And if you can remind yourself of that, then the human being across from you, you can say, "Wow, they've had a different life experience that has given them a different filter to see this. Maybe I could try to understand that a little bit more." And in the process, I'm now looking at you as a human. When I look at you as a human, I recognize your inherent dignity and your worth. That would never lead me to attack you or label you, even if you voted for the person that I just cannot stand. That's the advice I would give. Absolutely. Thank you for the invitation and I hope this adds some things for your students to be able to discuss.

In a time of deepening political division, how do we lead with both conviction and humility? In this episode of Daring Dialogues — part of Stanford GSB's Leadership for Society course — Professor Brian Lowery sits down with Maury Giles, CEO of Braver Angels, the largest nonprofit in the United States dedicated to depolarization. Maury shares how Braver Angels has grown from a single weekend experiment bringing together Trump and Clinton voters in rural Ohio to a national movement of 80,000 people across all 50 states — and what that journey has taught him about leadership, civic culture, and the courage it takes to truly listen. Together, Brian and Maury explore: What "courageous citizenship" means — and why it's the antidote to both cowardice and recklessness in public life How to facilitate productive disagreement without letting conversations collapse into labeling and attacks Why people don't choose their opinions so much as experience them — and what that means for how we engage across difference The skills, mindsets, and ground rules that make difficult conversations actually work Whether you're a student, a leader, or simply someone trying to navigate a divided world, this conversation offers both a framework and a challenge: stop trying to win, and start trying to understand. Daring Dialogues is part of the Leadership for Society curriculum at Stanford Graduate School of Business, exploring how leaders can drive meaningful change in complex, contested, and divided times.