Rachel Carlson

And knowing these details about a person can help us be more open to them.

That's Juliana Tafour, the director of the Bridging Differences program at UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center.

That's where Rudy and Allison teach their class.

And these tactics can help us be more charitable towards others, like by looking at the strongest parts of their arguments instead of the weakest, and more humble, just understanding where we might need more information or circumstances where our own beliefs might be limited.

Yeah.

Like I know I don't know everything.

And even the things that I think I know well, like there's always more to learn.

So it's not really that any one of these things or even all of them together is a magic wand that's suddenly going to help us all agree.

Yeah.

And that doesn't seem like the goal.

No.

Like for Jeannie and Richard, they both told me neither of them have really changed any of their opinions in the last 44 years of marriage.

But it was clear to me just by talking to them, they really admire each other.

They respect each other's beliefs.

And I think what's most important here is they try to understand why they each hold the opinions they do.

Special thanks to Kenneth Barish.

He wrote a whole book about some of this stuff called Bridging Our Political Divide, which is going to come out in the next few weeks.

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