I wanted to do another Ask Me Anything podcast, but I know I'm going to get inundated with

questions about my conversation with Noam Chomsky. So in order to inoculate us all against that,

or at least to make those questions more informed by my view of what happened there,

I wanted to do a short podcast just dealing with the larger problem as I see it

of having conversations of this kind. More and more, I find myself attempting to have difficult

conversations with people who hold very different points of view. And I consider our general failure

to have these conversations well, so as to produce an actual convergence of opinion and a general

increase in good will between the participants, I consider this the most consequential problem

that exists. Apart from violence and other forms of coercion, all we have is conversation

with which to influence one another. And the fact that it's so difficult for people to have

civil and productive discussions about things like US foreign policy or racial inequality or

religious tolerance and free speech, this is profoundly disorienting. And it's also dangerous.

If we fail to do this, we will fail to get everything else of value. Conversation is our only

tool for collaborating in a truly open ended way. So I've been experimenting by reaching out to

people to have difficult conversations. I recently did this with the Muslim Reformer Majid Newaz,

which resulted in a short book entitled Islam in the Future of Tolerance, which we published in the

fall. And as you'll read in that book, this was not at all guaranteed to work. A Majid and I had a

very inauspicious first meeting. But when I later saw the work he was doing, I reached out to him,

and the resulting conversation is one in which we made genuine progress. He opened my mind on several

important points. And most important, it was a genuine pleasure to show readers that conversation,

even on very polarizing topics, can occasionally serve its intended purpose, which is to change

minds, to even one's own. Now here I would draw a distinction between a conversation and a debate.

...