Best gift I've ever received has to be a bike when I was younger, a pedal bike.

It was a sort of slick little road bike and I remember it was all like, it was so, it was all wrapped up,

it was so obvious what it was obviously because nothing's shaped like a bike and I had a little ribbon on it and I was so

a guest. For that was a life changer and I'm still sort of big on cycling around my area now so, for that one change me a little.

Enjoy in every sip with red cups now back at Starbucks.

There's one thing that I need you to learn from this whole conversation. It's not what you say that matters since what people hear.

You may think it's total crap but you understand why they feel that way.

Welcome to Fill In the Blanks. Frank Lutz, who has been a guest on this podcast is a USC professor and president of Frank I Lutz and Associates, a survey research and consulting firm.

Now when he was on recently he invited me over to his house for a focus session with a group of USC students. Half of them identify as Republican or at least right leaning in their political views and the other half identify as Democrat with a real left leaning, more liberal view and there are a few independence in between.

And he asked me if I wanted to participate in that to see if we could talk about how to eliminate or at least improve on the divisiveness between these two sides and get them to maybe communicate in a more productive way.

I said, well you better not ask me if you don't want me to show up and I did show up. We spent several hours with these bright intelligent, articulate, passionate young people on both sides.

And by the way, it was a Friday night with college kids in Los Angeles and they cared enough to take their Friday night in LA to come over to this professor's house and sit down and go through this.

It's just no longer productive to be possessing an us versus them attitude. Look, there's just too much of that we have to learn to work together in this episode.

We're going to dive into an awful lot about why we have this stance where we're like gunfighters out in the street, where we've squared off and inner any kind of interaction diametrically opposed.

Frank and I are going to demonstrate how to have an open and hopefully responsive debate, Republican versus Democrat.

To do this, we're going to have to be in prompt to and the only way that works is if you're willing to listen.

You can't respond if you don't listen. We're going to do this in prompt to in front of the group. So it's going to put he and I on the spot.

We're also going to talk about how to get back in touch with the fact that we're dealing with a human being on the other side.

Because everybody admits that they get so wrapped up in their values that they forget, there's actually a human being over there that has a lot in common with me.

I'm also going to share some FBI negotiation techniques and questions that have been perfected across time.

That are really important in getting the other person to loosen up their death grip on their position and be willing to consider some different positions.

We're going to talk about how they label one another, how Republicans describe Democrats and how Democrats describe Republicans.

...