JACOB MCHANGAMA: Disagreeing Without Losing Each Other

21:29Jacob Mchangama:I can see why you decide to vote for that person, even if I still very much disagree. And I think that's the sweet spot.

21:37Megan:It's difficult. So you validate the person without validating the argument.

21:40Jacob Mchangama:Yeah. And it's a difficult position. But again, if you allow yourself to be in the mindset, again, as I said before, of I'm not entering this discussion in order to win. I'm entering this discussion because it's a topic that I'm passionate about. I have certain beliefs, but I am willing to change my mind. I am very cognizant about the fact that I am not omniscient. I am a human being with very limited knowledge. And just about every person that you meet will have some kind of experience of some kind of knowledge that you don't have. And if you are willing to tap into that, you can come away from a conversation with something that is really valuable to you, even if it doesn't change your fundamental beliefs about certain things.

22:37Jacob Mchangama:And also coming away from conversations and dialogues without the need of having one, of sort of owning the other person as sort of as part of online culture where it's really about winning the discussion.

22:50Michael:I think that's really helpful. And you're right, that's kind of the holy grail. You know, if we can manage to do that, it would change a lot, I think. You know, one of the things I was thinking about this morning, again, as I was kind of preparing for this, is not so much at the meta level, but at the personal level, where the idea of boundaries comes in. You know, like where a conversation, like imagine the same conversation you were just talking about. And in one scenario, that conversation can potentially deepen the relationship. It certainly could make the individual people in the conversation refine their arguments and have sort of intellectual benefits, but hopefully even relational benefits of understanding, you know, that that can go deeper.

23:36Michael:We have also all been in conversations that were damaging to us. you know, emotionally, psychologically, that the relationship was in worse shape at the end of the conversation than it was at the beginning and that real damage was done. And so I'm curious, as a free speech advocate, at a personal level, how do you think about boundaries? And really, what I mean is safety. Like, how do we create some semblance of psychological safety and not sort of abandon ourselves to being maybe victimized in a conversation for just lack of a way, a less extreme way to say it, and also not infantilize ourselves.

24:19Michael:I mean, there's just like a lot of tensions wrapped up in that. But I think people feel this sense of, I would like my conversations to have the potential to make my relationships with people I disagree with deeper, but I also don't want to get hurt all the time. And so how do we reconcile those two things? Yeah.

24:36Jacob Mchangama:So I think if you strive to live up to those ideas that I outlined before on your own part, and you start out with that, but if your interlocutor is not interested in going down that same route in order to make it more productive, and you give them the benefit of the doubt, And if they then consistently only try to denigrate you, then you're under no obligation to continue with that conversation. It's not like free speech does not mean that you have an obligation to listen to anyone at any given time. And so you can have these ideals that you try to uphold, knowing that you'll probably be upholding them imperfectly.

25:20Jacob Mchangama:But if that's sort of generally your outlook, but whoever you're in discussion or dialogue with is not interested or incapable of extending the same to you, then I think it becomes more meaningful to just disengage and say, you know what, I would like to have a conversation with you about this. but it has to be within certain meaningful parameters. If that's not how you want to have a discussion, then I suggest we cut our losses here. And I don't see that as corrosive to free speech at all. I mean, it's not like you have to, on social media, go out and actively subscribe to the most toxic accounts and just sit there and listen passively to whatever they say.

26:05When you're in those difficult conversations with other people, are there any rules that you kind of rehearse in your head to sort of manage your own behavior?

26:15Megan:Because one of the things that will often happen to me, and I suspect it happens to other people too, is that my nervous system gets activated before my brain.

26:25Jacob Mchangama:Yeah. Yeah.

26:26Megan:And so that I'm speaking and I've said something hurtful. And I, if I had been able to think about it with a more regulated nervous system, I probably would have done a much better job.

26:38Jacob Mchangama:Yeah.

26:38Megan:So how do you self-manage that on the front end? So you just don't get so easily,

26:43Jacob Mchangama:and I hate this word, but triggered. If those who listen and watch are interested, they can go and look at my social media footprint and they can tell me how good a job I've done. I don't want to come across and sound like I'm sort of the perfectly virtuous social media user. And I feel it like there's a, I have like a throbbing vein here where I get, when there's something where I sense my intolerance really rising, that's when I know it's probably better to lock off or take a deep breath. So often I've sort of said, okay, I'll type something in and then I will end up not publishing it, not pushing the button, because I know I'm likely to regret it.

27:29Jacob Mchangama:I've also, and I don't know how consistently, but I think it's quite powerful to apologize. If you say, you know what, that was out of line, or what I said there was my emotions getting the better of me, that encourages more good faith discussion rather than the other person being then tempted to respond in kind. So there's actually an opportunity there to get back on track, however difficult. I've certainly been guilty of writing stuff that I'm not proud of and that has been guided more by emotions than reasons.

28:08Megan:You know, one little hack that I've engaged in, Megan, you may have done this too, I don't know, but if I get an online comment, for example, on a Facebook account and it's nasty, yeah my temptation in the past as megan will verify is that i would you know just respond in anger and say something that somebody else had to clean up after and one of the things i've done with those kind of comments they're not thankfully they're not too frequent but i just copy and paste it into ai and then i'll say look i want to respond gracefully to this but i also want to be clear about my position. So I have a hard time doing those two things at the same time.

28:51It's been frankly amazing.

28:54Megan:I had one particular person on Facebook who gave me a really nasty response to something. And I don't remember what the issue was, but I went through that process and posted and that person actually apologized to me because it deescalated the conversation. And so, from my perspective, if I have to use a crutch like AI until I can get trained to do that myself, the world's better off for it.

29:20Jacob Mchangama:Yeah, I think that's quite creative, especially if you've trained the AI on your writings and your personality so that it knows who you are, so that it stays true to your values. I also think that sort of self-deprecating humor can be quite a powerful tool because if you do that, sometimes the other person will realize that they went too far and will look at themselves and their post and say, oh. So there are different strategies that you can use, but escalating and responding in kind rarely leads to anywhere productive. It's like the honey tip with the poison roots that the Buddha talked about a long time before social media.

30:08Michael:I've been thinking about this with myself. And I think one of the things that I'm trying to do more intentionally is to say out loud when I've been wrong about something and own it. We're not engaging in a lot of controversial stuff, you know, professionally. So it's, it's more like in closer relationships, but to try to be intentional when my mind gets changed by something and I, I want to be open to that, you know, like that's a, that feels like a spiritual discipline almost for me to say, like, I'm going to be intentional about being open to being wrong. And then when I am say, I was wrong about that.

30:43Michael:And here's what I changed my mind, you know, why I changed my mind or whatever. For me, that feels important, you know, just to, I think we need more of that. Like, that's what I would like to see other people do in the world is, is to say, you know, I thought that was right. But then the more I thought about it or had whatever experience, I realized that was really wrong. Or maybe not, maybe it wasn't even really wrong. Maybe it was just like in some nuanced way off base. And I think it's helpful the more, when we have to always be right, or we always have to be totally wrong. And, and we, and our, like you were saying earlier, our identity is wrapped up in that to the point that we can never say we're wrong or we can never say that we made a mistake, that's a really dangerous place because then you kind of get into this sort of ideological sunk cost fallacy situation where like you can't ever backtrack or change or evolve or grow.

31:28Michael:And hopefully in relationships, you know, we are able to evolve and grow. And that's one of the gifts of relationships. So I'm trying badly to do that, but I think that's one of the things that I've kind of put into practice myself as like a little accountability check.

31:46Jacob Mchangama:It also makes it much easier for the other person than to be quote unquote vulnerable in that conversation and being open to change because suddenly it's no longer sort of win at all costs. And by winning, I mean denigrating the other side. It's the win-win situation where we both can say, you know, yeah, I was wrong about this. okay, yeah, thank you for acknowledging that. I also made a comment that I regret about this. And then you move into a space where there's more confidence and a closer connection. So I think that's really helpful.

32:22Michael:Okay, let's talk about leadership for a second. So a lot of the people that we're talking to have some leadership responsibility. That might be in a nonprofit context. That might be in the context of their own business or other organization. But certainly, we all have leadership in our lives, even if it's kind of informal. But when we're in a context where, you know, maybe we're in a workplace and everything's so contentious and consequently we can just have these surface relationships rather than going deep, how do we create a culture within our organizations where we can have honest disagreement, but the relationships can remain intact.

33:04So I guess really what I'm asking you is to take what we've talked about now and now apply

33:08Michael:it at scale, where you've got 10 or 20 or 100 or 500 people in a context, and we're trying to do this.

33:16Jacob Mchangama:Yeah, it's been really interesting for me to move as a CEO from Denmark to the United States, because obviously work culture is quite different. In Denmark, it's typically a very flat, non-hierarchical structure that is not the same in the US where there's more, in my experience, where people are more differential towards the boss, for instance. Whereas in Denmark, obviously someone has the ultimate responsibility and so on, there are hierarchies and stuff, but it's much more flat and non-hierarchical. And I think I have not really known any other way. So I think the way that I try to manage here, please have my employees, colleagues can come up with anonymous comments and call me out if I'm wrong.

34:09Jacob Mchangama:But I think I've just, without even being particularly conscious about it, tried to just have that same style here. For instance, many of my colleagues here were not used to having lunch together where we all meet around the table and have lunch together. That was very alien to them, whereas that's something that I've always done and where you can have where everyone from the intern to the CEO just sit around and we can have a conversation about things. And also, no one needs to call me boss or sir or anything like that. So in that sense, I think that I hope that people in my organization feel more confident about being open and also coming up with criticisms about things.

35:00Jacob Mchangama:I've certainly, when we've done sort of retreats, encouraged where we've had these processes. I think last year we went somewhere and we really wanted to be very more precise about our mission and vision. And again, that was an exercise that involved everyone in a setting where you could, where anyone had the opportunity to speak out. I think that's extremely valuable. Obviously, this is also a relatively small organization. It's a very value-based organization. So that might be different from a much bigger one, but that's been my experience. I would not want to be the CEO of an organization where my employees do not feel confident in telling me if they think even a strategic decision or something is wrong.

35:45Jacob Mchangama:Obviously, at the end of the day, someone's got to make a decision. But then it's also up to me to justify why I might stick with the decision. But I just feel that ultimately the decision-making process just becomes better because there are a lot of things that I don't know. And I have a group of smart people, deeply committed people who care about the mission and vision of this organization. And so I want them to contribute. And that also means pointing out my potential blind spots. And they certainly are there.

36:19Megan:Do you think it's ever legitimate in a context like before the last election or during the pandemic when policy was hotly debated? Or as a leader, you just say, look, we're not going to talk about that at work because it's disruptive and it's a drag on our productivity. And if you want to have those conversations elsewhere, we encourage it, but not here. Is that legitimate or do you think that's?

36:42Jacob Mchangama:Yeah. And again, I think that also depends on the size of the organization. But yeah, I could imagine that might be appropriate in some organizations. I've not had to do it here. And maybe that's in the DNA of an organization that is committed to free speech. But on the other hand, we do self-censor in certain ways in the sense I don't comment on... I think it would be inappropriate for me as the boss, if someone, when we sit around and have lunch, if someone says something about their political views or religious views or whatever, and I was just to say, that's flat out wrong. You shouldn't believe that.

37:27Jacob Mchangama:That would not be constructive for the CEO to do that. But where we are now, I feel we can have pretty candid discussions. But then again, we also do not. So I never comment, for instance, on social media or on broader political issues, just because I don't think that would undermine the credibility of the organization. And the same thing with my employees, even though our mission and vision is to create a resilient culture of free speech, that means that we have to stay silent on certain topics because otherwise we would lose credibility in the eyes of the public. So that's counterintuitive, but I think important.

38:14Michael:Okay, so you're also a dad. Yes. You've got a couple of teenagers. My husband, Joel, and I had dinner with you and your wife, Sarah, just on Friday. And we were talking about challenges that we're both facing with our teenagers and all the rest. How are you guys modeling with your kids how to engage with disagreements?

38:35Jacob Mchangama:We're failing.

38:38Michael:It's really hard, right?

38:40Jacob Mchangama:I'm just trying to get any kind of conversation with my son these days, who's 16. And we both watch, religiously follow an English soccer team called Arsenal. So we get up very early sometimes to watch that. That's sort of our main quality time together these days. But in general, he's not very interested. But then there are times when, you know, he's interested in history. He's also intellectually curious. So there are sort of little windows where we do have these kinds of conversations. One thing that I am concerned about, and this I think is maybe particularly relevant to teenage girls, is that there's a strong sense that they have to conform that I think is being reinforced by social media.

39:33Jacob Mchangama:So how do you create that resilience and that sense of self-worth that doesn't depend on external validation of a peer group, whether it's in school or on social media? That, I think, is something that my wife and I are still working on, building up that confidence muscle. And I can't say that we've succeeded, but I think that's really important to grapple with. and something where you need to have some difficult conversations with your children. The problem is that I haven't cracked the code for how you have long, engaged discussions with teenagers when very often they just roll their eyes and think that you're wasting their time.

40:20Michael:We haven't figured that out yet either. So I think we have to defer to my dad, who's successfully raised five adults. Now we're still mid-process, right?

40:29Megan:I don't know if I could call it successfully raised. Hey, hey. Let me just put it this way. I did my best. I'm really proud of all five of them. But they are their own women, for sure.

40:42Michael:Okay. Well, as we are kind of wrapping up our conversation, Jakob, I'd love to hear you just reflect on if we could fast forward, it's 20 years from now. And as a culture, particularly in the U.S., maybe in the Western world at large, we've learned how to talk through our disagreements with tolerance, with respect, rather than around them or shutting them down. How is the world 20 years from now different if we've successfully been able to do that?

41:12Jacob Mchangama:Well, then maybe we're in a position where we look back at the current era and say, wow, that was a crazy time. And we never want to repeat that again. And here are the main lessons that we can draw from that and that we've implemented into education, into civic life, into professional life, into political reforms, into reforms of public discourse. I think that would be the sweet spot. But again, I'm an anti-utopian. So I think we can definitely get to a better place than where we are right now. But we're not going to get to this place where there will never be polarization and there will never be bad faith arguments and so on.

42:05Jacob Mchangama:But I mean, when you think about the consequences of the printing press, for instance, right, that led to brutal persecution, to religious wars and so on. And you could have been forgiven if you lived through that to like if you were in the 1530s, having said, well, that was the worst invention ever because my family was just wiped out. But today we look back on it as something extremely valuable that really pushed our civilization forward. So hopefully we can also look at this time that we live through now and see that there were also extremely valuable things. And we've learned to navigate them more wisely than we're currently doing.

42:46Jacob Mchangama:I mean, for me, in Europe, if you go back 300 or 400 years, there was a widespread belief that you could not live in the same country if you had different religious beliefs, right? People would persecute, kill each other over what many today would view as these really, really weird theological differences that have very little relevance for ordinary life. And that is something that we learn to overcome through religious tolerance, through freedom of conscience and freedom of speech. And so maybe we can apply some of those lessons to this moment that we're living through now.

43:28Megan:Yeah. Jakob, thank you so much for this conversation. For people that want to follow up with you and learn more about your work, in addition to buying your book, Free Speech and History from Socrates to Social Media, and I know you have a new book coming out, but where can people go to find sort of the one-stop shop to find all things related to you?

43:46Jacob Mchangama:So you can go to at jmshangama, that's my X, but also my sub stack that I've become a bit more active on. Those would maybe be the best resources. Thanks again for a great conversation. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

44:02Michael:Thanks, Jakob.

44:13Megan:So Megan, what were your takeaways from that conversation?

44:16Michael:Well, I really appreciated Jakob's perspective, first of all, because it made me realize that I'm not alone in feeling like talking with the people I love, the people kind of in my real day-to-day life is harder than it's ever been. That's like a, that's normal. Not normal as in good, but like that's an experience that we're all having to greater and lesser degrees. So I think it was validating on the one hand, but it was also hopeful because I felt like the nuances and guidance that he provided for how to be curious, for how to stay open when we're disagreeing with someone, for how to not, you know, kind of fight to win, as he said, but rather seek to understand and kind of stay in that place of curiosity.

45:08Michael:It helped me realize that there is a path forward, not in all cases. Obviously, there's just going to be some, you know, full stop, like deal breaker ways that people want to interact with us, including sometimes in our own families or, you know, in our circle of friends, so to speak. But that in our real personal lives, there is a way to talk through disagreements and come out with our relationships strengthened instead of necessarily harmed. That felt like good news to me.

45:38Megan:It felt like it to me too. And I can think back over my decades of being on this planet. And whenever I've gotten into a debate, shall we say, and I felt like I landed that zinger and it was a mic drop moment, that I almost immediately afterward felt regret. And I think in conversations where I've been able to not pull any punches, but be respectful and listen as much as I talked, that I left those conversations feeling really good, not only about my participation in the conversation, but hopefully how the other person felt when they left. And I think sometimes we lose sight of that. And the worst possible outcome, and we've probably all had these relationships with people, where we left the conversation feeling diminished in some way, maybe feeling like we weren't as smart or we weren't as articulate as the other person.

46:37Megan:And we just didn't feel good about it. And it didn't draw us together. It didn't make us want to get with that other person again. And so I just want to make sure that I'm clear about how I want everything to end, the conversation to end and then reverse engineer my behavior so I get there. Does that make sense?

46:54Michael:Yeah, absolutely. I think the other thing that he put words to that maybe I hadn't really found the words for yet is just the loneliness that results when we choose to disengage entirely, when we sort of make that unconscious preemptive decision, you know, before we go to Thanksgiving or before we go to, you know, on that trip, we're going to see family or something like that. And we just decide we're not talking about anything. You know, it's like we sort of do the preemptive damage control in our mind and think, okay, these are the things we're going to talk about because we're safe. We're not even going to go there.

47:29Michael:And what that means is you feel a lot less known and you don't have connection because you're not talking about anything that matters. You know, you're just trying to get through it and it should go without saying, I mean, it's probably worth saying in some situations that is the best decision, you know, like that is the lesser of two evils. But what I took away from this is a lot of times my instinct would be to assume that that's the lesser of two evils without counting the cost and that there is a cost. And if you're going to pay that cost, you better know what you're, you know, what the exchange is for.

48:02Michael:Because a lot of times the discomfort of finding a way to have a conversation that, that is simultaneously one where you don't compromise, you know, what you feel to be true in a way that that would diminish you and, you know, be a violation of your values or whatever, but you also choose to engage with somebody else in a way that's honoring to them. That is the harder path for sure, but it is the path that makes it possible to maintain connection even where disagreements are still existing.

48:33Megan:Well, from our faith tradition, yours and mine, I think there's a couple of admonitions from the Bible that are helpful. One is speak the truth in love. Yeah. Those are two things that are difficult. It's almost like two magnets that are trying to move away from each other. They seem in contradiction. And yet the best outcomes happen when we hold those two things together, both truth and love. And the other watchword for me, and this is really personal for me, I just keep saying to myself over and over again, be quick to hear, slow to speak, and slow to anger. And if I can do that, I think I'm good.

49:10And I think one of the things that can happen in our current social media climate is this pressure to respond quickly to everything, to have a take, like right now.

49:20Michael:And there's a lot of value in just taking a second. It doesn't have to be a long second. I mean, like, you know, some of this stuff is so darn obvious. Like, you know, it doesn't take a lot of time. but the pressure should come from moral clarity, not from other people telling us like to jump into the fray, so to speak. I don't think there's a lot of value in just jumping into the fray for its own sake. And I find that I think better if I give myself a minute and sometimes that's literally 15 minutes, sometimes that's overnight to get my thoughts together and reflect rather than just react. We just don't wanna be in reactive mode.

49:59Michael:I think that is the big idea, right?

50:01Megan:Well, guys, thank you for listening to this episode. And you would do us a great favor if you would rate the show and give a short review. That'll help us get visibility with other people that are just passing through podcast land and looking for a podcast. It raises our visibility and we'd be grateful. But until next time, have a great week.

50:31Thank you.