906 - Here To Understand: How Braver Angels Is Orchestrating Tough Public Health Conversations
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.8 • 620 Ratings
🗓️ 12 June 2025
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
About this episode:
In 2016, the nonprofit Braver Angels was founded to bring together diverse groups of people to try and figure out why productive communication has become so difficult. During the pandemic, the conversations got even harder. In this episode: How Braver Angels is bringing together questioners and supporters of public health to hear each other out with a goal of humanizing, understanding, and remembering that “everyone is worth listening to.”
Guests:
Dr. Leslie Lapato is a retired psychiatrist who has worked with Braver Angels since 2017 in a variety of roles including alliance chair, debate chair, debate whip, moderator, and organizer.
Dr. Beth Malow is a neurology sleep physician and science communicator who has worked with Braver Angels since 2017 in a variety of roles including moderator, workshop designer, and debate chair.
Host:
Dr. Josh Sharfstein is vice dean for public health practice and community engagement at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, a faculty member in health policy, a pediatrician, and former secretary of Maryland’s Health Department.
Show links and related content:
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Our Mission—Braver Angels
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Confronting our COVID condescension—Braver Angels
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Colorado Springs company works with Braver Angels to promote civility through debates—The Gazette
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Braver Angels spreads its ‘building bridges’ gospel across Greater Minnesota—MinnPost
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, |
| 0:05.9 | where we bring evidence, experience, and perspective to make sense of today's leading health challenges. |
| 0:16.3 | If you have questions or ideas for us, please send an email to public health question at jh. |
| 0:22.6 | Jh.edu. That's public health question at jh.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:29.6 | Dr. Leslie Lapedo and Dr. Beth Mallow. Thank you so much for joining me on Public Health On Call |
| 0:36.6 | to talk about your fascinating work with Braver Angels. |
| 0:40.5 | And maybe I'd start with you. Leslie, tell us about your organization. |
| 0:45.4 | Braver Angels is a national nonprofit organization that was founded after the 2016 election by a small group of people who wanted to get together some Trump supporters |
| 0:57.7 | and some progressives slash liberals to talk about why we're having so much trouble talking to |
| 1:03.5 | each other. And the goal was to try to allow each side to see the other side as human beings as opposed to villains. And they started out |
| 1:14.9 | with a workshop in Ohio, which progressed to a bus tour in the Midwest. And then we developed a number |
| 1:22.5 | of different workshops that are oriented towards bringing together people from different |
| 1:27.0 | perspectives to give |
| 1:28.7 | them a safe opportunity to talk to each other. What an interesting idea. And Beth, tell me in |
| 1:35.0 | general how those sessions went. Really well. People were pretty anxious in the beginning about |
| 1:43.6 | how it would go. I was involved in Braver Angels since |
| 1:47.2 | almost the beginning, 2017. And when you tell people, hey, I'm going to go to a session or help |
| 1:55.8 | lead a session, Leslie and I both help lead some of the workshops that we do at Brager Angels. |
| 2:02.3 | People would look at me like I had three heads. |
| 2:04.8 | Really? |
| 2:05.9 | You want to talk to people about politics? |
| 2:09.1 | What's wrong? |
... |
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