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(upbeat music) (audience chattering) (bell ringing) - Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, October 28th, and I'm Kristen Baird Adams, president of the City Club Board of Directors.

I'm particularly excited to be here today as we mark the City Club of Cleveland's 110th annual meeting, which also is the Samuel O Freedlander Memorial Forum on Free Speech.

So it's particularly fitting that we welcome to our podium Dave Isay, who, as many of you know, is the founder and president of StoryCorps, a fascinating public service rooted in the belief that every story and every voice matters.

Since launching in 2003, StoryCorps has provided more than a half a million Americans with the opportunity to, in Dave's words, record meaningful conversations about their lives and pass wisdom from one generation to the next.

The StoryCorps archives at the Library of Congress is the single largest collection of human voices ever gathered, illustrating that, more often than not, we find common points of interest, rather than those that divide us.

You could argue that StoryCorps' work has never been more important, nor is the impact of its One Small Step initiative, which you'll hear more about today, that brings strangers together with different political views for recorded conversations.

Not to debate politics, but to learn about who we are as people.

You see this idea of bringing people together from different backgrounds, beliefs and political leanings has been the work of the City Club since our inception in 1912.

In fact, the City Club's first professional staff member, Ralph Hays, penned in 1916 the City Club's Creed, and we thought that it provided some important context for our conversation today.

And we're gonna share just a bit of the first few lines.

"I hail and harbor and hear persons of every belief and party, for within my portals, prejudice grows less and bias dwindles.

I am the product of the people, a cross section of their community, weak as they are weak and strong in their strength, believing that knowledge of our failings and powers begets greater strength.

I have a house of fellowship, under my roof informality reigns and strangers need no introduction."

So here we are in our house of civic fellowship, of civil, civic dialogue where prejudice grows less and bias dwindles.

And despite the last line about not needing introductions, we are excited to introduce Dave Isay, founder and president of StoryCorps.

If you have a question for Dave, you can text it to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

You can also tweet your question @thecityclub and the staff will do it's best to work it into the program.

Members, friends and guests of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming StoryCorps founder and president, Dave Isay.

(audience applauding) - Hi, it's great to be here.

Thank you, Kristen.

Thank you for the lovely introduction.

I'm really happy to be here at the City Club and hello Ideastream listeners.

So today I'm gonna talk about StoryCorps and play a bunch of stories and as Kristen said, talk about this new effort that we've launched around political polarization.

But before I do, I'm curious who here listens to StoryCorps, knows what StoryCorps is.

Okay.

Oh, that's pretty good.

Okay, recorded an interview?

Okay, a couple, okay.

All at one table.

(audience laughing) All right, members of Ideastream?

All right, good.

All right, I like that.

And have no idea why you're listening to me and are waiting to get back to work?

(audience laughing) Okay.

Somebody's lying.

No hands.

So StoryCorps, as Kristen said.

I was a public radio producer for many decades before starting StoryCorps.

Always interested in the public service value of radio, for better or worse, more so than the entertainment value.

And had this love doing radio documentaries, had this crazy idea 19 years ago, this week actually, we put a booth in Grand Central Terminal where you can bring anyone who you wanna honor by listening to their story.

A parent, a friend, grandparent.

You come to the booth with, say, your grandma, go inside, you're met by a facilitator who works for StoryCorps, door shuts, you're in this kind of sacred space, the lights are low, complete silence, and for 40 minutes you listen and you talk to your loved one.

Most people think of it as, if I had 40 minutes left to live, what would I say to this person who means so much to me?

Everybody cries in the booth.

And I knew from doing radio documentaries that the microphone gives you the license to say things and to ask things that you have never asked before.

So they're very intense conversations.

At the beginning of StoryCorps, actually, the booth was empty.

Nobody could figure out quite what we were doing.

But eventually, when we started broadcasting on public radio, it got very popular.

And as Kristen said, we've had about 650-700,000 people across America participate so far.

And essentially, because of what's happening in the booth where people are talking about what's most important in their lives, it's 40 minutes to leave a record to future generations.

Every interview goes to the Library of Congress.

Your great-great grandkids are gonna hear this.

We're kind of collecting the wisdom of humanity.

So let's just start by playing and listening to a few stories.

We launched in New York, slow at the beginning, got very popular and then we became a national project.

And we have these Airstream trailers that travel around the country, that are mobile recording booths, collecting, honoring, this is all everyday Americans, honoring the stories of everyday Americans.

So the first story we're gonna play is from Jackson, Mississippi, and this is Aidan Sykes, who's in fourth grade, and his dad, Albert.

And we're just gonna hear three minutes of their 40-minute conversation.

This is a sample of what happens in the StoryCorps booth.

So if we can go to the next slide and hit play on the story.

(upbeat music) - [Aidan] Do you remember when you first saw me?

- [Albert] I remember when the doctor pulled you out, the first thing I thought was that he was being too rough with you, and he actually held you like a little Sprite bottle.

And he was like, "Here's your baby".

That was the most proud moment in my life.

Don't tell your brothers 'cause there's three of y'all.

But it was like looking at a blank canvas and just imagining what you want that painting to look like at the end, but also knowing you can't control the paint strokes.

You know, the fear was just, I gotta bring up a Black boy in Mississippi, which is a tough place to bring up kids, period.

But there are statistics that say Black boys born after the year 2002 have a one in three chance of going to prison and all three of my sons were born after the year 2002.

- [Aidan] So Dad, why do you take me to protests so much?

- [Albert] I think I take you for a bunch of reasons.

One is that I want you to see what it looks like when people come together, but also that you understand that it's not just about people that are familiar to you, but it's about everybody.

Did you know the work that Martin Luther King was doing was for everybody and it wasn't just for Black people?

- [Aidan] Yes, I understand that.

- [Albert] Yeah, and so that's how you gotta think.

You decide that you want to be a cab driver, then you gotta be the most impactful cab driver that you can possibly be.

- [Aidan] Are you proud of me?

- [Albert] Of course, you my man.

I just love everything about you, period.

- [Aidan] The thing I love about you, you never give up on me.

That's one of the things I will always remember about my dad.

- [Albert] Wow, you said it like I'm on the way outta here, or like I'm already gone.

- [Aidan] So Dad, what are your dreams for me?

- [Albert] My dream is for you to live out your dreams.

There's an old proverb that talks about when children are born, children come out with their fist closed because that's where they keep all their gifts.

And as you grow, your hands learn to unfold because you learning to release your gifts to the world.

And so, for the rest of your life, I wanna see you live with your hands unfolded.

(quiet guitar music) (audience applauding) - So Ideastream listeners, you've heard this story, there's an animation that's playing here and that's what's gonna happen throughout the hour.

What do I wanna say about that?

I think StoryCorps in many ways is the opposite of reality TV.

Nobody comes to get rich, nobody comes to get famous.

It's just an act of generosity and love.

And people often talk about crying when they hear StoryCorps stories.

And like this one, most StoryCorps stories aren't sad, but I think that it's so rare that we get to hear people being genuine and authentic with each other, with no ulterior motive, that you're almost walking on holy ground when you hear people having this act of generosity, looking a loved one in the eyes and saying, you matter and you won't be forgotten, which causes people to cry, unexpectedly, at funny stories.

Like, I sometimes I don't quite know what to say.

I am gonna play a hard story though, so be prepared for that and I'm gonna do that now.

I hear there's an election coming up in Ohio.

(audience laughing) Oh, thank you for putting that slide up.

So this is a story that I've thought about a lot in recent months.

It speaks to great political leadership.

It's about the assassination of Bobby Kennedy.

And for listeners, we're seeing a still of Bobby Kennedy on the floor in Los Angeles after he'd been assassinated.

And there's a young man cradling his head in a white busboy's jacket.

He looks to be about 17 or 18.

And this is a famous photograph that was taken seconds after Bobby Kennedy was shot.

The busboy was a Mexican immigrant named Juan Romero, an undocumented immigrant.

At StoryCorps, Romero remembered how he met Senator Kennedy the night before he was killed while delivering his room service.

So let's start there and listen to this story.

- [Juan Romero] They opened the door and the senator was talking on the phone.

He put down the phone and says, "Come on in, boys."

You could tell when he was looking at you, that he's not looking through you, he's taking you into account.

And I remember walking out of there like I was 10 feet tall.

The next day, he had his victory speech.

So they came down the service elevator, which is behind the kitchen.

I remember extending my hand as far as I could.

And then I remember him shaking my hand, and as he let go, somebody shot him.

I kneeled down to him and put my hand between the cold concrete and his head, just to make him comfortable.

I could see his lips moving.

So I put my ear next to his lips and I heard him say, "Is everybody okay?".

I said, "Yes, everybody's okay".

I could feel a steady stream of blood coming through my fingers.

I had a rosary in my shirt pocket and I took it out, thinking that he would need it a lot more than me.

I wrapped it around his right hand, and then they wheeled him away.

The next day, I decided to go to school.

I didn't wanna think about it, but this woman was reading the newspaper and you could see my picture in there with the Senator on the floor.

She turned around and showed me the picture, she says, "This is you, isn't it?".

And I remember looking at my hands and there was dried blood in between my nails.

Then I received bags of letters addressed to "The Busboy".

There was a couple of angry letters.

One of them even went as far as to say that if he hadn't stopped to shake your hand, the Senator would've been alive.

So I should be ashamed of myself for being so selfish.

It's been a long 50 years, and I still get emotional, tears come out.

But I went to visit his grave in 2010.

I felt like I needed to ask Kennedy to forgive me for not being able to stop those bullets from harming him.

And I felt like, it would be a sign of respect to buy a suit.

I never owned a suit in my life.

And so when I wore the suit and I stood in front of his grave, I felt a little bit like the first day that I met him.

I felt important, I felt American and I felt good.

(poignant music) - So a few things to say about that story.

So Mr. Romero and his wife recorded together, a couple of weeks before the 50th anniversary of Bobby Kennedy's assassination.

And it was about a month later, he passed away suddenly, unexpectedly.

So it's kind of a reminder not to wait, that if you have a loved one who you are interested in interviewing and want to talk to, you really want to just grab that moment and do it.

It's also, I mean, I think Studs Terkel, who remembers who Studs Terkel was?

Okay, that's good because sometimes I do speeches and nobody raises their hands and that makes me very sad.

(audience laughing) Studs Terkel was a great oral historian from Chicago, who at 93 cut the ribbon on our first booth in Grand Central Terminal.

And he was a big proponent of history from the bottom up.

And that's what we just heard with Mr. Romero, that, so often history is told through, states people and politicians.

But the value and the texture that we get from hearing about history through everyday people, I think, is incredibly valuable.

We got a letter at StoryCorps right after Mr. Romero died from someone who said.

I don't have the letter with me, I wish I had brought it, but he had, on the 50th anniversary, it turns out Mr. Romero flew again to Arlington National Cemetery to pay tribute to Bobby Kennedy.

And he snuck in, as did this guy who wrote the letter, right before the gates closed and he had his suit on again.

And he sat crying at President Kennedy's grave and the man asked who he was and he said, "I was the person who cradled President Kennedy's head".

And the young man said, "Well, you know, he's my hero".

And Juan Romero said, "I'm glad he's still remembered".

And then he died a week later.

But the letter writer wanted us to know that Mr. Romero got to say goodbye to President Kennedy one more time.

I'll play something lighter for you guys now.

(audience laughing) We're gonna move to Ohio now.

This takes place in Ohio.

It's a 94-year-old named Betty Jenkins who came to one of our StoryCorps booths, Airstream trailers, to talk about a newfangled contraption that she got from her mother 70 years before, an inflatable bra.

(audience laughing) So let's listen to Betty Jenkins.

- [Betty] I was very skinny and I didn't have any curves.

I guess my mother got kinda worried because she didn't think I had enough boyfriends.

So she bought me a bra that you blow up.

I was real excited.

So I blew and blew till about 32.

I was quite happy with the looks.

I got a few wolf whistles.

Of course, at that age, you're very self-conscious.

That year, I took a trip to South America.

I proceeded to fly to Santiago.

Soon we were into the Andes Mountains and it turned out that it was a non-pressurized plane and I felt very uncomfortable.

Things were getting very tight.

This bra had started to increase in size.

As the thing got bigger, I tried to stand up and I couldn't see my feet.

The directions said it would go to 48, if I wanted it to.

I thought what will happen if it goes beyond 48?

And I found out what happened.

It blew out.

It was a loud, resounding sound.

And the co-pilot came into the cabin with a gun wondering what had happened.

The men all pointed to me.

Well it's difficult to explain to people in English that part of your anatomy just blew up, but to try and do it in Spanish, it's beyond hope.

So they made a landing.

I was taken off the plane and turned over to two women police.

And they told me to strip, hunting for what they thought was the bomb.

When I stripped down, I showed them the hole in the bra and they chuckled.

And I thought, "Oh my, they've gotten the point".

And I was allowed back on the plane.

A month later, I got a bill from the airline for $400 for an unscheduled stop.

(cheerful music) (audience applauding) - Betty Jenkins.

All right, now getting closer to home, a story from Cleveland.

Michael Ryan is a juvenile court judge.

And like many of the people he encounters in court, he did not have an easy childhood.

At StoryCorps, he told his son, who is also named Michael, what it was like growing up in a turbulent household and how it made him the person he is today.

So let's listen to Judge Ryan.

- [Judge Ryan] My mom was about four feet 11.

She had big brown eyes, beautiful smile and soft lips.

I remember those when she kissed me.

I adored my mom, but she was addicted to heroin.

My mother and my stepdad, they were more concerned about that next high than necessarily whether or not we were going to school.

I saw a lot of things that kids should not ever witness.

I saw your grandmother being thrown up against walls, slammed on the floor, slammed outside on the concrete.

And the way I used to try to escape is I'd go outside, played a lot by myself with the little football that I had, just throw it up and play, just to stay away.

And I could go to a library and read every single book that they had in there to find a way to escape from reality.

And so with you, I do just the opposite of what my parents did.

When you were born, aside from the doctors, I was the first person to hold you and kiss you and talk to you.

I would give you the shirt off my back, my underwear, my socks.

I would go stark naked just so that you could be clothed.

And I make sure that you eat before I eat, no matter what.

- [Michael] Is that why sometimes you get upset when I skip breakfast?

- [Judge Ryan] Oh yeah.

Because there were many times when I was little that we just didn't eat.

And I think that's why I'm probably tougher than some other parents.

- [Michael] You're sometimes overbearing.

But I know where you're coming from, Dad.

I have your name so I have to set a good example.

Only times I want to see you is at home, at my games.

I don't wanna see you in court.

- [Judge Ryan] I've told you many times, I want more for you than I do for myself.

You have been a wonderful son and I love being your dad.

- [Michael] I love being your son.

(Judge Ryan chuckling) (poignant music) (audience applauding) - So I had the pleasure of meeting Judge Ryan today and actually eating lunch with him because he's right here at the table.

(audience applauding) So if you could please give him and Mrs. Ryan a round of applause.

(audience applauding) Michael is working today out of town.

We send him our love and he recently got married, as did their daughter.

So it's an honor, like probably the best part of my job is getting to meet people in stories.

So about three days ago, I was preparing for this and I knew I was coming to Cleveland and I looked in the archive and I heard this story and I was like, "Oh my God".

(audience laughing) "We've gotta get Judge Ryan here."

And my whole staff remembered him and they called him and here he is.

So we're honored.

Thank you.

I am gonna talk about One Small Step now, which is our latest effort.

Kristen talked about it briefly at the top and it is so aligned with the City Club's ethos and values of free speech and protecting our democracy.

So I've been privileged over the last 19 years running StoryCorps, having a front row seat and watching who we are as Americans, people like Judge Ryan and Mrs. Ryan and Michael.

And frankly, I'm in agony seeing what's happened to the country.

It's a little bit corny to say, but StoryCorps' a nonprofit in the human connection business.

And five years ago, five, six years ago now, we started becoming increasingly concerned about the chasms that were opening up across the political divides and the growing culture of contempt across the divides in the United States.

Our concerns were never about arguing or disagreeing, but about people across the divide seeing one another as less than human, the dehumanization that's started to really spiral out of control.

The problem that's called affective polarization has gotten much worse since we started thinking about it.

My wife said to me a couple of weeks ago that when we started, it was a two-alarm fire and now it's the World Trade Center.

You've seen the polls.

Half of the country says it's likely we'll see a civil war in this country in our lifetime.

More than half of all Americans say the greatest threat to our country comes from our fellow citizens.

15% of Democrats and 20% of Republicans say the nation would be better off if large numbers of Americans from the opposing party just died.

We've gone from disagreeing with one another to hating one another, which poses a very serious threat to this country because a democracy can't survive in a swamp of mutual contempt.

So we started thinking about whether there was a way that we could use what we'd learned over the years to make, at least, a small dent in the problem.

Our Hippocratic oath is to do no harm to participants.

So we've spent six years testing and developing a new kind of interview methodology.

We started putting strangers across the divide together for StoryCorps conversations.

All of the hundreds of thousands of interviews we'd done before that were people who knew and loved each other.

So these are strangers across the divide for 50 minute conversations, not to debate politics, but just to get to know each other as human beings under the premise that it's hard to hate up close.

We tested and refined the new kind of interview methodology over the years and called it One Small Step.

I'm gonna play a quick animation that speaks to the spirit of the effort.

This is Joseph Weidknecht, who's a laid-off sheet metal worker who showed up in an anti-Trump protest in Austin in a Make America Great Again hat.

Amina Amdeen, who is a student at UT, was one of the marchers at the protest that day.

And they came to StoryCorps to remember the moment that brought them together.

Let's watch.

- [Amina] I noticed you with the hat 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.

- [Joseph] Wow.

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

- [Joseph] 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.

I just, 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.

- [Joseph] 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.

- [Joseph] 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?

- [Joseph] I was homeschooled.

So it was a vastly different experience socially.

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

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

- [Amina] Aw.

- [Joseph] 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.

- [Amina] Yeah.

- [Joseph] You know?

- [Amina] I'd like for this to encourage other people to engage in more conversations.

- [Joseph] Yeah.

- [Amina] With people that you don't agree with.

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

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

(slow bluesy music) - So that was kind of an inspirational story that led to One Small Step, which officially launched last year in three cities, Wichita, Richmond and Fresno.

The first of what we hope will be a slew of cities across the country, maybe even someday, Cleveland.

Cities that demonstrate to the rest of the nation that it's possible to see each other as human beings across the political divides, despite what we may see on 24-hour news.

I have to say that what we've seen since launching is incredibly encouraging.

If you could put up the next slide.

For radio listeners, I put up a slide of the five people in what we call our Brain Trust.

Social psychologists, pollsters, experts in conflict mediation, who've been working closely with us on One Small Step over the years.

For those in the audience, Dr. Jennifer Richeson is the second from the right on that slide.

She's a MacArthur-winning social psychologist who's studying the impact of the One Small Step interviews, the experience of two people coming together, strangers coming together, at her lab at Yale.

And seeing what happens when two people, two strangers, come together and have these conversations.

What we've seen is beyond anything that I'd hoped for.

Most of these conversations between strangers and in exactly the same way with the participants feeling like they've become friends and wanting to get to know each other even better.

One Small Step is based on something called contact theory, which may be the most studied theory in the history of psychology, developed by a psychologist named Gordon Allport in the 1950s, that says that when two enemies come together face-to-face for a conversation under very specific circumstances, at the end of that conversation, that sense of hate can melt away and they can see each other as friends, ideally.

And it's very difficult to achieve that, but with a lot of work from the team at StoryCorps, I think we have figured out a methodology that kind of is contact theory at its highest and best use.

I'm gonna play.

We've also been creating snippets of audio, of course, out of these interviews to share back with the country to try and social norm the idea that it's okay, maybe even kind of wonderful to talk to people who have different beliefs than you who are strangers.

This is a public health campaign that we'll be launching in the coming years to try and shift social norms because when people see others engaging in a positive behavior, those behaviors become contagious, we know from many psychological studies.

Unfortunately, contempt and violence can also become contagious, which we know all too well.

So I'm gonna play you just one of the excerpts.

This is not a regular StoryCorps story like the one we've been listening to.

This is just an opportunity to eavesdrop on two people across the political divides, getting to know each other as human beings.

And just a note before we start it, that as part of this process, each of the participants gets a bio of the other participant with their first name and a paragraph about who they are.

So let's hit play and I'm gonna read the cards to the radio audience that show up.

It says, what happens when two strangers with opposing political views sit down for a conversation about their lives, not politics?

You're about to find out.

- [Cassandra] Let me ask you this.

When you read my bio, what did you think?

And please be as honest as you feel comfortable 'cause nothing could bother me.

- [David] So the first part, my mind kicked into stereotype, she's probably dyed-in-the-wool Democrat, end of story.

Second part was intriguing because you said something along the lines of an open mind.

I thought, well this will be interesting.

- [Cassandra] When I read your bio, I just thought you were a white man.

(David laughing) I thought I was gonna come in here and just.

- [David] I don't even know what it was.

I don't even remember what it was.

- [Cassandra] And that's what's so interesting to me, is that I'm just like.

- [David] Stereotype!

- [Cassandra] That's exactly right.

So I have to admit it.

And I appreciate you receiving that and allowing me to admit my stereotype.

Because when you walked in the door and you stood up and introduced myself, I was like, "Oops, oops, oops!".

I don't feel threatened.

I hope you don't feel threatened.

Once we leave this conversation, I hope, I believe we'll have other conversations with others, maybe visit, maybe your wife and my husband and four of us can get together and continue a conversation.

But my point is that, what are we afraid of?

(poignant music) - And a card identifies them as David and Cassandra from Birmingham, Alabama.

It says, One Small Step believes it's our patriotic duty to see the humanity in people with whom we disagree.

Join us at One Small, takeonesmallstep.org.

So one of the people from the expert slide that I showed a couple of minutes ago is Tim Dixon, who is the world's leading authority on the drivers of polarization in societies around the globe.

He co-founded a group called More in Common.

And in recent years, the organization for obvious reasons, has spent a lot more time studying the United States.

A few years ago, he coined the phrase, the exhausted majority.

He found that most of the country, about 86% of it, is sick of polarization, scared about our future and looking for a way out.

So I'm gonna show you some research that More In Common has just completed.

You'll be the first people in the world to see it.

Over the summer and the fall, up until October, Tim and his team have been studying One Small Step interview excerpts, like the one that we just watched.

So very few of the findings that have come in, the Ideastream listeners, I'm showing some slides.

I'll give you the headline in this slide.

General findings about the state of our union.

Nine in 10 Americans feel the country is more divided than it's ever been.

If you could go to the next slide.

The good news is that nine in 10 Americans want to learn about the experience of people across the political divides.

Next slide, More In Common tested the mission and language of One Small Step and found that three out of four Americans, regardless of political beliefs, support the work.

If you go to the next slide.

On the content we're creating, about 80% of Democrats and Republicans are moved by the content.

Independents, less so, about 60%.

Next slide.

Finally, this is a slide that is one of the slides that's really exciting to us on the One Small Step team.

About 42% of Americans say they'd be interested in participating in a One Small Step interview, but that number rises to 62% after they've seen a One Small Step story like the one we just watched.

So exposure to One Small Step content increases Americans' willingness to record an interview by almost 50%.

So that's where we're at with One Small Step.

As it said at the card that we just watched, our dream is to convince the country it's our patriotic duty to see the humanity in people with whom we disagree.

We know this is the moonshot of all moonshots.

We have no illusions about how hard this is.

We know there's a hundred billion dollar hate industrial complex of media and social media out there that is making a lot of money getting us to hate each other.

But we're gonna take a hard swing at it and try to help One Small Step take root across America.

We really need to do everything we can right now to see the human being across divides from us.

Abortion is an important issue to so many of us.

Guns, voting rights, the environment, but I think the most important issue by far right now, by far, is holding this great country of ours together.

So that's One Small Step.

And Kristen, let's do some questions.

(audience applauding) - Thank you.

We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

I'm Kristen Beard Adams, president of the City Club Board of Directors.

We're joined today by Dave Isay, founder of StoryCorps, talking about one of his initiatives, One Small Step, part of StoryCorps, of course.

We welcome questions from everyone, City Club members, guests, students, and those listening via our livestream at CityClub.org or our radio broadcast at 89.7 Ideastream public media.

If you'd like to tweet a question, do so @thecityclub.

You can also text your questions to 330-541-5794.

That's 330-541-5794.

May we have our first question please.

- Thank you so much for coming.

Bobby Kennedy spoke at the City Club on April 5, 1968, the day after Martin Luther King was assassinated and his daughter Carrie, appeared at the City Club 50 years later.

And I asked her, how is your father able to have a coalition of working class whites and Blacks when he won the Indiana Primary in 1968?

And she said, my father showed up to these communities and he listened.

Why is it so difficult for politicians to do that today?

And for people in general to do that?

- This is not my area of expertise.

I mean, I think that, I think that, you know, so social, we're living in an increasingly polarized society where we're rewarded on Twitter and so forth with likes and getting dopamine hits on Facebook for being as outrageous and divisive as possible.

So all of the drivers that kind of exist in this, the great paradox of the technological age that we live in is that, it was supposed to help us, bring us closer together, cell phones and so forth.

But it's really, in so many ways, driven us apart.

So there are kind of a myriad of factors that have come together.

There's a psychologist named John Haidt who wrote a piece in The Atlantic in April called something like, why has America become so stupid over the last 10 years?

And I would suggest that that is about 30 pages that will answer your question in great detail.

But I, you know, again, from that, if you think about, we have Judge Ryan is on the ballot and running for office.

And you know, I think that, and obviously character really matters.

And we heard in that story about a man of great character, Bobby Kennedy.

You know, when Juan Romero told that story, it was the first time that anybody had ever heard what Bobby Kennedy's last words were.

So it became a big national story.

"Is everyone all right?"

You know, and it's hard to imagine, many of the politicians today, the first words out of their mouth being, "Is everyone all right?

", so, you know, I think part of what we're trying to do at StoryCorps is remind people about who we can be at our best.

And the truth is that, again, there are these drivers for this small percentage of the country that are driving us apart.

But that's not really what America is.

Most of us are, care about our kids and want to see this democracy thrive and survive.

So unfortunately it's a small.

Tim Dixon, the expert I was talking about before, talks about the margins, the 8% on either side, liberal and Democrat, whose voices are so loud but, and are completely out flanking the people who are looking for democracy that functions better and has leaders like Bobby Kennedy and Judge Ryan.

- My concern, my question is with groups in this country spending so much time and money trying to get people to hate each other, have you tried bringing teenagers, considered straight and trans teenagers, gay teenagers, bringing them together to do a story, similar to the ones that you're doing now?

- We've done every possible permutation of people coming together and Mr. Rogers used to carry around a quote in his wallet from a nun in Philadelphia who's still alive, I think, she must be in her mid nineties, named Mary Lou Kownacki.

And the quote was, "It's impossible not to love someone whose story you've heard".

Now, that's not true a hundred percent of the time, but like 98% of the time, it is true.

And I do think that this getting proximate with each other, talking to each other, a big part of what.

We were just talking about this before I started speaking, you know, that Mother Teresa said, "We've forgotten that we belong to each other".

People feel that, there's so much anger and a lot of that anger I think comes from people just feeling like they're not being heard and they're not being respected.

This is across the political divides and I think if we spent more time listening to each other and less time screaming at each other, just imagine what a stronger country that we would be.

Thank you for bringing that up.

And we have a lot of stories of trans families on storycorps.org, animations and so forth.

And again, we don't have a political agenda and I believe that there's a flame of good in everybody, no matter what your politics are.

And our job is to kind of fan that flame into a roaring fire if we can and it's important that we look for the good in one another.

So thank you for that.

We don't have a political agenda.

Our only agenda is that all of our lives and all of our stories matter equally and infinitely.

And if we can hold onto that, I think this country can really go places.

Thank you.

- My question has to do with "Our America", which some people may not know about, but I'm wondering if you're still in touch with LeAlan and Lloyd, who were basically the authors of this book.

- Yeah, so before I did, I started StoryCorps, I did radio documentaries for many years, and one of the documentaries I did, took place in Chicago, and it was two kids who, growing up in the Ida B Wells Projects, that don't exist anymore.

They were 13 and 14 at the time, this was 35 years ago.

And they took tape recorders and documented what their life was like and then wrote a book about this.

Yes, I'm in touch with them every day.

Unfortunately Lloyd has sickle cell anemia and he suffered a stroke about three and a half months ago and it's unclear if he's gonna survive.

So he is 45 years old and we're pulling for him, but he has not come out of his coma yet.

And it's not looking good.

And LeAlan is a football coach.

- My question is about, I have family members, cousins that are about 180 degrees different politically, and it is the elephant in the middle of the room in an otherwise good relationships.

And is there a way through StoryCorps, with StoryCorps, to engage in that conversation without it blowing up?

- So we call it One Small Step because it's the first small step.

And we did a lot of testing with One Small Step before we launched it, and we did stuff with family members and decided not to focus on family members because really what we're looking at in One Small Step is toxic polarization, dehumanization across the divides.

We know what happens when societies dehumanize people, the Germans, Hitler called Jews, "Untermenschen", less than human.

You have slavery, you have Rwanda, we know where polarization can lead.

Now in families, we argue, but you ideally you probably don't want that person dead.

So we, at One Small Step, we suggest people don't talk about politics.

What we're trying to do is build a little bit of social capital so that other people can come in and we can begin to have those conversations.

But without the kind of foundation of seeing the other person as a human being, there's no chance to even begin those conversations.

So I would say tread lightly and there may be something.

We have an app that makes it possible to record StoryCorps interviews anytime, any place.

And with one tap, upload 'em to the Library of Congress.

So the safety of that, people kind of bring their best angels in when they know that their great-great-grandchildren are gonna listen to them someday.

So you may want to try to just talk to them with the app and just come at some of these issues quietly and also listen to what they have to say and hopefully they'll listen to you as well.

- What's happening in the first three One Small Step cities and how does it work in these cities operationally?

- Okay, so we have three cities that we're focused on.

Again, we're looking to expand there.

We have an air game and a ground game in each city.

Basically we have a list of, in order to participate in One Small Step, you go onto a site, takeonesmallstep.org, you sign up and we have thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of people on a waiting list.

If you're in a One Small Step city, you're at the top of the waiting list.

So during COVID, we did all of our interviews remotely.

We're now moving towards face-to-face interviews.

So in Wichita, Richmond, Fresno, we're actively doing many interviews on the ground with people and we're also doing advertising.

We're starting this social norming campaign.

So on your social media feeds, you're gonna start to see messaging about the importance of listening to one another and the dangers of toxic polarization and starting to see these videos as well.

So the idea is that everybody in the city should know about it.

Everyone who wants to participate can participate and that we'll see, you know, we do, one of the people in that experts list was Joel Benenson, who's a very famous political pollster.

And what we'd like to see happen is that the cities come to see that it is important and gratifying and wonderful to speak to people across the divides.

And that the temperature goes down in these cities, the toxic polarization begins to decrease.

- The oldest rule of war and politics is divide and conquer.

- [David Isay] Yes.

- How can you stop that between the political parties and most especially the news organizations when they bring a gallon of gasoline and a match to the fight, instead of sitting and treating each other civilly?

Thank you.

- Well that, so as I said, I mean, it's an absolute David and Goliath fight, but you know, you're absolutely right and all of the rewards go to the dividers.

I've done StoryCorps for 19 years now.

We've done hundreds of thousands of interviews.

We have facilitators who sit in the booth and they call it bearing witness to these interviews.

We've had more than a thousand of them who serve.

They're the corps of StoryCorps, who serve a year or two of StoryCorps, and then they go back and do whatever they're gonna do with their lives.

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

And that is, there might have been some kind of a selection bias when we were in the hundreds and thousands, but when you get to the hundreds and hundreds of thousands, there's gotta be some truth to it.

So, I think StoryCorps in some ways is a hope machine.

And we have to just believe that our better angels can prevail.

And you know, Bobby Kennedy said in that famous speech, the Ripples of Hope speech, that with a thousand, if there are a thousand of ripples of hope, that they can rise up and create a wave that overcomes the worst of us.

And we are the ripples of hope.

And the good people who are Americans, I think can overcome this and say we've had enough.

It's just time to say we've had enough.

And again, when you look at the polling, those voices are loud, but there is an exhausted majority in the middle.

86% of the country does not want this.

And that 86% of the country has to speak up and if we do, we'll win.

So conclusion.

Okay, I'm getting the sign from Dan.

So thank you for being here at the City Club.

I appreciate it.

Just a final thought.

A few weeks ago I was on the West Coast giving a speech and I got spend time with another participant named Scott Skiles.

And Scott came to the big StoryCorps, the family StoryCorps with his son, Zach, a bunch of years ago.

Zach served three tours of duty in Iraq and came back with very, very serious PTSD.

They hadn't talked about it before.

We have these different initiatives that serve different verticals in the country, and one of them is military families.

And they came in and Zach talked to his dad about what had happened to him in Iraq.

He ended up coming home and becoming homeless and had just extremely severe PTSD.

By the time they talked, Zach was in a rehab program and has since gone on to finish college.

And he's getting, I think he just finished his PhD.

But Scott, his dad, came to this event and we played the story.

And when I first met him after playing his story, he handed me a piece of paper and he said, "I just want you to have this because it's given me a tremendous amount of strength through the years dealing with everything that's happened with Zach".

And I opened it up and it was a very short quote from a theologian I'd never heard of, named Frederick Buechner, who died actually just a couple months ago.

Very simple message.

It said, the Buechner quote was, "Here is the world, beautiful and terrible things will happen.

Don't be afraid."

So that's my message to you.

Don't be afraid, keep up hope when things seem hopeless.

When it feels like the odds are completely against us and that this democracy is gonna dissolve, we have to fight back and say no, and we can do better than this.

And remember that our neighbors are our neighbors, not our enemies.

And this is not a zero sum game.

And if we can do this, we're gonna leave a better country for our kids and our grandkids, which is all any of us want.

This is a story from Chloe Longfellow.

As a child, Chloe Longfellow was close to her grandmother, Doris.

At StoryCorps, Chloe remembers the lessons her grandmother taught her, especially in the kitchen.

- [Chloe] She had red hair, it was red hair out of a bottle, but it was still red hair and she was a spitfire.

If you messed with her and she didn't think it was right, she would tell you.

But I do remember that she always smiled with her eyes, even when she was angry, even when she was tired.

She was my very first best friend.

It's really surprising the amount of life lessons you can learn in a kitchen if you have the right teacher.

She used to try to tell me about acceptance and how to be a good human being.

She'd get all the ingredients for soup and she'd look at it and she'd go, "Now see, honey, this is how the world works.

Some people are onions, some people are potatoes.

That'd be a really boring soup if you just put potatoes in there, wouldn't it?

But if you had leeks, if you add some bacon, then you make this wonderful thing.

And all these different people come together to make this wonderful thing called our world".

And one time she had grown some beets.

We brought 'em in, cleaned them off, and I got to move the page in the cookbook and I had beet juice all over my hands and I left a little tiny hand print on her cookbook and I started to cry 'cause I thought I had ruined it.

That was grandma's favorite book.

But she took a piece of beet and she covered her hand and she put her hand print on the other side and made our our thumbs touch in the print and said, "It's perfect now".

If I really miss her, I just open the book and go back to that page.

She touched it so often that it still smells like her.

Even all these years later.

She used to tell me that the sky was black velvet and the stars were holes that had been punched in the ceiling of heaven.

And that was how our loved ones looked down at us and saw if we were doing wrong or if we were doing right or just check in on us every so often.

So every time I look up at the sky, she's there.

(poignant music) (audience applauding) - Thank you all so much.

Thank you.

- Thank you, Dave Isay, for joining us at the City Club of Cleveland.

We would also like to thank Ulmer & Berne for their support of today's forum, which is the Samuel O Freedlander Memorial Forum on Free Speech.

Mr. Freedlander was a member of the City Club most of his life, serving as president in 1962 during the City Club's 50th anniversary year.

His daughter, Nina Freedlander Gibbons, one of the first female members of the City Club, who is here with us today, along with his granddaughter, Wendy.

We thank you so much for your support of the City Club and for being here today.

We would also like to welcome guests at tables by Ideastream Public Media, Ulmer & Berne and the United Way of Greater Cleveland.

We're so happy to have all of you here today.

Next week at the City Club, we welcome Congresswoman Liz Cheney on Tuesday, November 1st.

She will be in conversation with PBS News Hour's Judy Woodruff.

Tickets are sold out for this forum, but you can tune in to the live broadcast at noon on 89.7 Ideastream Public Media or at the livestream, our livestream on cityclub.org.

Then on Wednesday, November 2nd, we are back at the Happy Dog in Cleveland's Gordon Square neighborhood.

Taking on participatory budgeting, Erika Anthony of Cleveland Votes will be moderating that discussion.

And finally, on Friday, November 4th, we will discuss how empathy can be used to improve police response and engagement in our neighborhoods.

You can find out more about these forums, purchase tickets and learn more about other upcoming events at cityclub.org.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to Dave Isay.

Thank you members, friends and guests of the City Club.

I'm Kristin Beard Adams and this forum is now adjourned.

(audience applauding) (bell ringing) - [Announcer 2] For information on upcoming speakers or for podcasts of the City Club, go to cityclub.org.

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