This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 7th, 2024.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In the new film Undivide Us, Director Christie Kendall walks viewers through the conversations that might not change too many minds in our divided times.

They certainly have the potential to lower the temperature and keep us all from turning political disagreement into personal animosity.

We spoke in January.

For those who engage in the shameful activity of watching broadcast or cable television.

We are sort of told a story about how Americans engage with one another.

And a key part of that story is the fact that everyone is awful and everyone is very angry and everybody hates each other and we cannot engage in civil dialogue and it's a very it's an extreme challenge and

people who internalize that story then do not engage in civil dialogue. And so part of what I've enjoyed,

your movie, Undivide Us, and it sort of explores the fact that what if we actually just picked a bunch of random people and

sat them down and I mean these are selected people of course but we sat them down and had them talk about what difficult

divisive issues what might that look like and what what would actually emerge.

So this film that you've made sort of follows Ben Clutzy of the Mercatus Center

through some panels, focus groups. whatever you want to call them.

Yeah. And people through by asking sort of particular questions about, you know, going through this ideological touring

test. Yeah. You ask people, why do you think that this person believes what they do?

Yeah, well, I mean, we really, we start with all these, the hardest topics. I mean, we were, we were looking to be authentic in terms of how people really see see

these tough issues,

guns, immigration, abortion, the things that people are really scared to talk about.

And so that's where we get we get in you know and I think that people are really

surprised that they can have these conversations and and then you know and then as you follow the film you know they're they're excited and you were prepared for these

conversations to not go well. I've this is a true story is going into the first one.

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