Welcome to episode 319 of Live Happy Now.

In case you haven't noticed, but I'm sure you have, our world has become increasingly divided recently.

But today's guest tells us how we can begin to close that divide.

I'm your host, Paula Phelps, and today I'm talking with Peter Montoya, a thought leader, speaker, and author who promotes civility and self-leadership as a tool for change.

His new book, The Second Civil War, A Citizen's Guide to Healing Our Fractured Nation, looks at the challenges we're facing as a society, how technology and media have assisted in creating more

damage, and what each of us can do to help stop the conflict. Peter, welcome back to live happy now.

Paula, thank you so much. I'm thrilled to be here. I am thrilled to have you here because we're having

such an important conversation today. And man, I have been so looking forward to having

this talk with you. And before we get started, I think it's really important to note that even though

the title might sound like we're talking about politics, this is really about people.

It is. All right. Great. So just clearing that up going in. This isn't, we have not turned Live Happy Now into a political show.

So with your new book,

like you are talking about the second civil war and you say that it's here. Can you tell me what

that war is about and what started it? It's a great question. So first of all, we clearly know it's

not like our last civil war, which obviously had, you know,

two different armies, two different governments and two, you know, very, very well-defined

organizations over a well-defined issue, state versus federal rights and slavery. That was what

that last war was about. And this war is best described as a social civil war. It is interpersonal more than it is between two

different organizations. It is, you know, parents against children. It is friends against

friends. It's co-worker against coworker. That's where the civil world's being held right now.

I don't know anybody who hasn't lost a friend or now has a distanced family member over political differences.

Yeah, and that's tragic when you see we are discarding valuable friendships, valuable relationships over politics.

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