Talking Politics with Sarah Stein Lubrano
Overthink
Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.
4.7 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 27 January 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Why does talking about politics so often feel useless? In episode 158 of Overthink, Ellie and David speak with Sarah Stein Lubrano, author of Don’t Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds, about why discourse is not the solution to political polarization. They discuss the problems with thinking about political opinions as a "marketplace of ideas," why public debates don't change our political views as much as personal relationships, and how social atrophy weakens citizenship. What is the value of political protests? How does the ideal of debate perpetuate politics as war? And should we re-imagine social media platforms like X to encourage productive dialogue, or log off of them completely? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts dive deeper into the politics of digital spaces and question where podcasting fits into Lubrano’s critique of how we discuss politics.
Works Discussed:
Sarah Stein Lubrano, Don't Talk About Politics: How to Change 21st-Century Minds
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Overthink. |
| 0:21.6 | The podcast where two philosophers put ideas in dialogue with everyday life. |
| 0:26.4 | I'm Ellie Anderson. |
| 0:28.0 | And I'm David Peña-Gusman. |
| 0:29.9 | To hear David's in my additional thoughts on the subject of talking politics and our interview with Dr. Stein-Librano, |
| 0:36.0 | check out our extended version of this episode over on Substack. |
| 0:40.1 | David, like a lot of people, I have been feeling an immense amount of despair recently about the |
| 0:45.2 | political situation in the U.S., especially when it comes to bridging divides between people |
| 0:50.7 | on different sides of the political spectrum. |
| 0:53.4 | And over the summer, I became aware of this book, |
| 0:58.0 | Don't Talk About Politics by the political theorist Sarah Stein Lubrano. |
| 1:02.9 | And when I first read this title, I was like, what? |
| 1:05.6 | Don't talk about politics? |
| 1:06.8 | I thought we were supposed to be talking about politics. |
| 1:08.8 | I thought, if anything, what I needed to do, |
| 1:10.8 | even though I'm a philosophy professor, |
| 1:12.8 | is go back to Logic 101 and brush up on my understanding of logical fallacies |
| 1:18.5 | in order to better point out the errors in reasoning that my opponents are making in hopes of some consensus. |
| 1:25.4 | And then I thought to myself, well, how well has that been working for me? |
| 1:29.5 | What I really need to do is get this book immediately and try and set myself straight a bit. |
| 1:34.7 | And to be clear, San LeBrono is not simply just saying, don't talk about politics. |
| 1:40.2 | What she's saying is that talking about politics is way less effective than we think it is. |
... |
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