Americans were sharply divided over the public health response to COVID-19, things like masking,

remote learning, business closures, and later vaccines. Five years on from the start of the pandemic,

Judy Woodruff recently sat down with two people on opposing sides of that divide trying to figure

out how to move forward as part of her series, America at a crossroads.

I'll be honest, the first conversation, I thought, this is never going to work.

This guy has such strong opinions that are so different than my strong opinions,

that it's going to be tough here to see if we can understand each other or try to find common ground.

Being a blue-collar guy from the Midwest,

somebody that is completely separated from everything going on here in D.C. and things like that.

I thought it was a very interesting concept, but I'm one that would have a conversation with anybody,

so I'm like, yeah, let's make this happen. Dr. Francis Collins has spent his life in medicine and research, a physician geneticist who led the project to successfully map the human genome in 2003,

before serving as director of the National Institutes of Health from 2009 to 2021.

Wilk Wilkinson is a career truck driver who now manages a team of drivers in rural Minnesota.

And in his spare time, hosts a podcast called Derate the Hate.

Even the people with the best of intentions, you know, often find they have these unconscious bias.

To engage with people across the political divide.

In 2022, they were brought together through Braver Angels, a national nonprofit that pairs people across that divide together to engage in civil discourse

about difficult issues.

That was the beginning of their friendship.

And the two recently met again at Collins' home near Washington.

You don't try to change minds, you just try to open them.

Where Collins explained that after stepping down as NIH director, he wanted to better understand

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