- Partisan hostility is increasing, a recent Pew Research Center survey cites growing shares, and each party now describe those in the other party as more closed minded, dishonest, immoral, and unintelligent than other Americans.

At a time of broadening political polarization, there's a push to bring people with differing viewpoints together.

What are the techniques supporting civil discourse, creating dialogue?

Today on "Newsmakers", we sit down with the creator of One Small Step.

It's an effort to remind the country of the humanity in all of us, even those with whom we disagree.

We're in Kalamazoo on the campus of Western Michigan University and we are guest of the Fetzer Institute.

WGVU is partnering with Fetzer and we are devoting our time to promoting civil discourse.

And I can think of no better person to discuss having humane conversations than with Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps.

Dave, thanks so much for taking the time.

- Thank you, it's great to see ya.

- Great seeing you too.

Friday mornings, NPR, if you're an avid listener, right around 8:30, Steve Inskeep's voice, you hear the guitar strings and it's time for StoryCorps and I know in about four minutes I will be crying.

- Sorry.

- That's okay.

I think this is an opportunity for people to hear the humanity of our country.

- Yeah, I mean last time we spoke, StoryCorps had probably recorded 30,000 people and we're now up to about 700,000 people.

So it's a very simple idea, it started out in Grand Central terminal, two people, you come with your dad to a booth, you're met by a facilitator and you sit across from your father for 40 minutes in this kind of sacred space, the lights are low.

And as you know, the microphone gives you the license to say things and ask things that you may never have asked before.

So from the very beginning of StoryCorps people thought of this is if I had 40 minutes left to live, what would I say to, what would I ask of this person who's so important to me?

At the end of the 40 minutes, you get a copy and another one stays with us and it goes to the Library of Congress, so your great, great, great, great, great grandkids can get to know your dad through his voice and story.

And yeah, a lot of people have recorded and it's all everyday people and it's about the beauty and the power and the poetry and the grace and the stories hiding in plain sight all around us if we just take the time to listen, it's our voice, our story.

And sitting with a loved one reminds them that they matter and won't be forgotten.

So I was just having a conversation about this before sitting down with you with someone from my organization who's at a journalism conference talking about how one thing that is very different about StoryCorps is that, you know our, for us, it's all about the participants.

In journalism, typically you interview someone and then you have a lot of people hear it or watch it or see it, and that audience is your audience.

And our audience, like the people who we're serving, are the two people who come to the booth, like they're primary, and that larger NPR audience is secondary for us.

So it's this kind of weird almost like mix of social service and journalism and very, very simple but I think beautiful.

And when you talk about crying, I mean I think most, the vast majority of the stories we put on are not sad, but it is, I said this to you 10 years ago when we last spoke, the opposite of reality TV, no one comes in to get rich or famous, it's an act of generosity and love.

And you're kind of walking on holy ground, especially at this time where outside of public media and maybe a few other places, there's so much nonsense and everybody's in it for the dollar.

When you hear people who are just talking to each other and listening to each other and connecting for no other reason then because they love each other, you're kind of walking on holy ground.

And I think that's why people always talk about their car swerving and all these kind of horrible things that happen on Friday morning when StoryCorps is broadcast and Steven Inskeep does that intro.

Well, it was a decade ago when you and I spoke and you left me with something that I've never forgotten, I've taken it with me, and that is you said that the voice is the gateway to the soul.

- Yeah.

- And it is so true.

- Yeah.

- You talked about recording with a loved one.

I did it with my dad 'cause it was your recommendation.

And I made an iMovie out of it when he passed, I scrolled it away for like six years, and I wish I had listened to it at least one time because there was so many follow up questions that I missed in that moment with him, but still made that video with photos, and it tells the story of his life.

It almost is a half hour mini documentary.

But to hear somebody's laughter and to hear their voice, it's more powerful than a photo.

- [Patrick's Father] So one night, our super swimmer, who was my best friend, he said, "I'm swimming the 50 tonight.

I'm gonna set the record."

Which surprised me.

And so the other fastest 50 guy was swimming the 100 with me and so off we go.

And my God, this kid's so far ahead.

I can figure out what at that stage his thought was.

He's gonna do that 50 and he's just gonna keep going and do that 50 just as fast and voila, break the record.

- The soul is kind of contained in the voice.

And I know you lost your dad, I'm sorry.

I'm glad you had a chance to do that.

There's a hack, which I probably shouldn't be talking about on TV, but there is a way to get that into the Library of Congress website so we can talk about that.

There's a way even if you didn't officially record it for StoryCorps but I hope you'll do that.

So your daughters and your daughter's kids and your daughter's kids can listen to it one day.

I mean I did the same, I don't remember if we talked about this when we talked 10 years ago, but I did the same thing with my dad and he died very suddenly, and this is a little bit inside baseball, but it speaks to kind of the vagaries of memory.

You know, I had recorded my dad who I was very close to and he died, you said six years, five or six years after you recorded?

- Yeah, six years.

- So my dad died six years after we recorded and I listened to it that night that he died for the first time at three in the morning.

And I'm an old dad, I have young kids and I knew this was the only way they were gonna get to know this person who was such a monumental figure in my life and that's, I thought I couldn't believe in StoryCorps anymore than I did, but that's really when the rubber hits the road and when you really realize the importance of these recordings.

I recorded with my dad and one of the questions, one of the main StoryCorps questions, great, we have these great questions, 20 most popular questions, is what are you proudest of?

And my dad was a psychiatrist and he was gay and he wrote books about coming out and all this kind of stuff.

And my memory was that he said, when I said, "What are you proudest of?"

He said, "My books, my work."

And I would tease him from that until he died, and I would say, "Dad, like I founded StoryCorps, every other person like who's ever recorded when you ask them what they're proudest of the answer is their kids and for you, it was your books."

And then I listened to it on the night he died and I said, "What are you proudest of?"

And he said, "My kids."

So I had had it wrong that whole time so.

- Is he the voice who was your inspiration?

- Well, I mean both of my parents were, I think.

I mean every experience that I had, I mean I made radio documentaries for decades before starting StoryCorps.

My dad was, so he was gay and he was in the closet and I didn't find out until I was in my early 20's and I had just fallen into radio.

And the first documentary I made was about Stonewall, which was this Rosa Parks moment for the gay rights movement in 1968, '69.

And I got to meet, like this was, now this was a long time ago, this was almost 40 years ago, 35 years ago.

And I met all the people who had been at Stonewall and it was a life changing experience for me.

And I had kind of, I was so shocked when I found out my dad was gay, I kind of went off and did this thing and then brought it back to him as a gift and we were very close after that.

But I think the fact that he held this secret and the way that that impacted our family, as my brother said when he found out, he said, "Our nuclear family just exploded" or whatever it was.

So I think that's part of it.

My dad also was, like didn't suffer, had no interest in kind of pompousness and was like very interested in just authentic people's stories and also stories of people who've been through difficult things as he had.

I was just thinking about that this morning.

And I think that StoryCorps in many ways is collecting the wisdom of humanity and I think that wisdom is held by those who have, like older people and people who've been through very difficult things.

And I mean that was what was of interest to him.

So I think that that had a huge influence on me as well.

And he was very much like just not interested in kind of celebrities, just like very, very interested in just people and their struggles.

And so that was a big influence.

And my mom was an editor, book editor and publisher for 50 years.

So that kind of focus on editing, which back when I made radio documentaries was, and still now, I help out with stories that we put on the air.

And I should say, as a journalist you'll understand the insanity of what we do, we put on 1/400th of 1% of what we record gets edited into these little three minute poems of who we are as human beings from StoryCorps.

- But it's those longer conversations.

And there is- - And yeah, the actual conversation is 40 minutes.

- But having conversations, the goal should be to learn, right?

Isn't that really what we're trying to do?

- To listen.

- To listen and learn.

- Yeah.

- And right now we need to do a little bit more of that in this country.

- Yeah.

- And you're on a bit of a mission right now, right?

- Yeah.

- With One Small Step, I stole it from your webpage.

Growing divisions in our country pose a threat to democracy.

You're pairing strangers with different beliefs.

I'll let you set this clip up.

- Sure.

- And then we can get into the conversation.

- Sure.

- Yeah so this clip, this is good because this is a kind of pre One Small Step, it speaks to the spirit of what we're doing, and we'll talk about that when we come back.

So this is a StoryCorps interview.

This is a clip that takes place in Austin, Texas and it's a guy named Joe Weidnik, who at the time was an out of work sheet metal worker, and Amina Amdeen, who was a student at UT, at University of Texas.

So there was an anti-Trump rally and Joe showed up at that rally in a Make America Great Again hat and they met that day and came to StoryCorps to tell the story of what happened.

- [Amina] I noticed you with the hat.

- [Joe] Mmhmm.

- [Amina] And I noticed that you were surrounded by some people and I noticed that they were being kind of threatening, and then somebody snatched your hat off your head.

And that's the point where I, something kind of snapped inside me because I wear a Muslim hijab and I've been in situations where people have tried to snatch it off my head.

- [Joe] Wow.

- [Amina] And I rushed towards you and I just started screaming, "Leave him alone, give me that back."

- [Joe] I don't think we could be any further apart as people and yet, it was just kind of like this common that's not okay moment.

You are genuinely the only Muslim person I know.

It's not that I've actively avoided, it's just I've just never been in the position where I can interact for an extended period of time.

So I guess my views on the Muslim community have been influenced by a lot of the news articles and things of that nature.

- [Amina] I feel like a lot of times in the media, you don't see the normal Muslim, the one that listens to classic rock like I do.

You don't meet that Muslim.

- [Joe] Can you tell me about where you grew up?

What was that part of your life like?

- [Amina] So I was born in Baghdad in Iraq.

I moved to the US when I was 10 years old.

- [Joe] Okay.

- [Amina] Being a Muslim girl, I stood out in almost every single way that you can in middle school, the worst time to stand out.

What about you?

How was it like when you grew up?

- [Joe] I was homeschooled.

So it was a vastly different experience.

Socially, it was, I didn't have I guess as many friends as most people would.

I only went to public school one year of my life and I got in three fights and I lost all of them.

I actually lost a lot of friends because of this election because of my political stance.

So I hope that I can be the reason that someone decides to talk to someone as opposed to just cutting them out of their life or blocking them on Twitter, you know?

- [Amina] I'd like for this to encourage other people to engage in more conversations with people that you don't agree with.

- [Joe] That's what it's all about.

I'm so glad I wasn't the only one who felt like that.

(gentle music) - So two people, opposite ends of the political spectrum, boom, there they are, part of One Small Step.

- Yeah.

And this is actually pre One Small Step.

And what makes One Small Step, so as I said, we've had 650, 700,000 people across America, every kind of person you can imagine participate in StoryCorps, and the big StoryCorps, signature StoryCorps, everyone, it's you and your dad, it's me and my dad, it's our grandparents, it's every single one of those had been people who know and love each other.

And the difference between StoryCorps and One Small Step at the highest level is it's strangers talking to each other.

So our Hippocratic oath is that we do no harm to people.

And we spent, we at StoryCorps became very concerned about what's called affective polarization, toxic polarization in the country five or six years ago.

So this is not a concern about arguing with each other, which is fine and healthy.

It's about what happens when we start to see each other as less than human.

And we were talking about Germany before the camera started rolling, slavery, Nazi, Germany, Hitler called Jews (speaking in German), less than human, Rwanda, I mean you see this in Russia and the Ukraine now, referring to people as not human, extremely dangerous.

And the rate of toxic polarization in the US across the divides has shot up.

I mean you've probably seen the statistics.

There's some not small percentage of Republicans and Democrats who feel that the country would be better off if everybody in the opposite party was dead.

And that is extremely dangerous.

So democracy can't survive in a swamp of mutual contempt.

And we have real concerns and I think that a lot of people have these concerns now about the future of our democracy.

What are we gonna do if we see our neighbors as our enemies?

There are polls now that show that we fear our neighbors more than our traditional international adversaries, the Russians and the Chinese.

It's just gone off the charts and it's out of control.

So we developed this intervention, which we tested for four or five years called One Small Step, which basically put strangers from across the political divides together, they meet for the first time, not to talk about politics, but just to get to know each other as human beings under the premise, that it's hard to hate up close.

We launched almost a year ago and our dream is to scale this thing across the country and to convince the country that it's our patriotic duty to see the humanity in people with whom we disagree.

We were talking about, you had mentioned something that I said in another interview a while ago about this multi-billion dollar hate industrial complex.

I mean in media and social media, there are billions of dollars being made getting us to hate each other.

And I'm very aware that One Small Step is a complete David and Goliath moonshot, but we got to try something 'cause the only thing we know for sure is that if this culture of contempt in the country wins, all of us are gonna lose.

So we're taking a crack at it.

And one of the places we're gonna do some work we hope is in Kalamazoo.

It's interesting you talk about that industrial complex.

I mean I was in commercial broadcasting for years and the consultants would come in and say, "Everybody loves the rollercoaster ride."

Right, you're talking about fear, hatred, same thing as that rollercoaster ride of what's coming around the bend next.

Humans tend to thrive off of that.

But what I don't understand, you mentioned polling, this is a recent Gallup poll, February, 2022 congressional job approval, I mean Americans approve of Congress 20%, disapproved 75%.

And yet somehow Americans are identifying who they are through their politics.

- Yeah, yeah.

Well the same thing, I mean that indicates a loss of trust in institutions in general.

I mean our profession journalism has even lower numbers, 16, 17% from 80% in the 1970s.

And it's all this fear and doubt that's being put into us.

And I think that roller coaster is hardwired into us.

I mean we are not that far away from who we were when we were in the caves and we were wired to be very responsive to threats, obviously, that's how we survived.

There's a lion over there, something, a wolf that's gonna eat, not safety.

So when people get our threat mechanism rolling, which is easy to do, you're gonna pay much more attention to that than stories of who we actually are as Americans.

When we've had 650,000 people participate in StoryCorps, the facilitators who go on the road and record, they're present for these interviews, they serve a year or two with StoryCorps and they're with you and your dad when you make that recording, they call it bearing witness.

And every one of them when they come off the road, if you ask them what they've learned, they give a version of the Anne Frank quote, that people are basically good.

And maybe there was some sort of selection bias early on, but when you get into the hundreds of thousands, there's gotta be a truth to it.

So that is not what we see when we watch TV, but it is the truth.

And I think that we also know from polling, and we do a lot of, we're a heart organization, but we have a lot of science behind what we're doing with One Small Step, most of the country falls into, there's a group called More in Common that has done tremendous amount of polling around this.

And depending on how you cut the polling, about 85% of the country falls into the exhausted majority, they're sick of the divisions, they're scared, they're tired of this and they want a way out.

So we are trying to speak to the exhausted majority, remind them that there is a way out and that what we're hearing from the various inputs that are coming into us are actually not true.

And the truth is that we are much more, we have much more in common than divides us and that if we listen more and shouted less, we'd be a much stronger country and that this is really dangerous.

When you've got you experts who have studied polarization around the world, there are three things that happen when you have a hyperpolarized society.

One is political gridlock.

The second is violence, which starts slowly and then goes quickly.

And the third is like deep mental health problems because people lose hope.

You don't know what to trust anymore.

Like you said, you look at trust in politics, trust in journalism, trust in medicine, trust in everything now, nothing feels real anymore, everything feels slippery.

So again, total David and Goliath fight, but we just want to shake people on the shoulders and remind them this is what's real, this is what's important.

And it's extraordinary to see what's happening in these One Small Step interviews, which are really starting to scale quickly.

We're in four cities primarily around the country and everyone ends the same.

People say, at the end of these interviews, people are scared going in, it takes courage, but you're with a stranger, and at the end, everyone, it almost belies belief, let's have dinner, I want to exchange emails, let's take a walk together.

There's just this sense of relief when you realize that this person who you thought you should hate is just a person just like you.

- All right, four cities, but let's extrapolate that, we're not in those four cities, right?

So you have certain techniques with StoryCorps, you have list of questions to kind of break through.

So when we're talking about a society that's being manipulated by a group who we don't trust very much, how do we begin to have those conversations?

If I want to have this with my friends and my neighbors, what are the techniques?

Walk me through some of this.

- Sure.

Well first of all, I should say, we're focusing on four cities but you can go to StoryCorps and sign up and do a One Small Step interview.

Now I admit that we have a 10,000 person waiting list right now so it may take us a little while to get to get to you, but you can do it.

What we do with One Small Step is purposefully not talk about politics.

And we haven't done this without the kind of very strict parameters of what happens in a One Small Step interview.

One Small Step is built on one of the most studied theories in the history of psychology called contact theory, which was developed in the 1950s by a psychiatrist named Gordon Allport, a psychologist named Gordon Allport.

And it says under very specific conditions, if you put two people together who think they're enemies and have them have a visceral experience with each other, at the end of that experience that hate can melt away.

In kind of the non-controlled experience of a One Small Step conversation, you're risking it but it's worth it.

And I think that the trick is to talk to people and listen to people you may not agree with, again, we call it One Small Step, 'cause we don't talk about politics.

Don't talk about politics.

Talk about what matters to you, ask questions, listen, and don't take bait.

Whatever you do, like don't yell and just listen.

Like everybody, this goes back to the origins of StoryCorps, people just want to be heard.

They just want to be heard, they just want to be respected and they just want to be treated with dignity.

And you're 90% of the way there if you do that.

So do good, get out of your bubble and sit with people.

Again, we are not equipped to have people talk about politics, but just getting to know someone who's different than you is, every time, you're gonna realize that your preconceived notions were were wrong, and it doesn't have to be just across a political divide.

There are other many other situations where you kind of prejudge people, could be around religion or whatever it is, and you just talk to them and you realize this guy could be my dad.

You and I are roughly the same age.

We grew up, right, in households where you didn't talk about your money, you didn't talk about religion and you didn't discuss politics.

It was kinda like the standard.

What's happened to us?

- Yeah.

You know, I think part of it is, I was hearing someone say that now, you reconnect with someone from high school and like it's 100% about politics and you never talked about that.

And again, this is being driven by social media, you know?

And not only is it, are we talking about politics, but both sides pick like very obscure outlier issues and people and that becomes the kind of obsession that everybody focuses on.

You know what I think, what StoryCorps does is I hope is shakes us on the shoulder and reminds us what's important.

And what's important are our families, the people we love.

And the politics stuff is often small talk and it's easy, you get a adrenaline, you get a brain buzz and you get brain chemicals like released when you have rage and fury and anger.

But just try talking about your lives.

Who was kindest to you in your life?

How do you want to be remembered?

Who was your dad?

That sort of stuff and see what happens.

It's gonna surprise you.

- You know, last minute.

- Yes.

- How do you become a better listener?

- We've all, I mean we've all got it in us.

My wife, and none of us are perfect at it.

Like in some cases, like I'm a terrible listener and I'm supposed to be the listening, all of us are terrible listeners sometimes and all of us are good listeners sometimes.

I mean I think what it is is just being focused on the person who's talking to you, not interrupting them.

And I think some of the under undergirding ideas of StoryCorps and public media, like none of us are the worst things we've ever done, assume the best in others and just be open and incredible things are gonna happen.

Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps, One Small Step.

It's not just a moonshot, you're gonna make it happen, Dave.

- Thank you.

I appreciate that.

- Thank you so much.

- Yeah.

- And thank you for joining us.

We'll see you again soon.

(gentle music)