I'm in South America. I'm in Argentina and Mendoza and the Andes mountains.

It's exciting. It's a moment of real transition here. It's a country I'm getting to know a little bit better because of my in-laws and family down here. I'm here for the holidays. But it's a fascinating culture. Right now, like many countries in the world, Argentina is going through a real transformation with a new, libertarian leader, President Milei. I don't know enough about Argentina's history to comment with real authority on it, but I do know what I've witnessed over the past few years, and things feel quite different than they did when I was here last year at this time.

I think in both, I think, Argentina has long had a problem with runaway inflation, the highest inflation rates in the world. Milei has tamed that down. That's something that I think affects everyone's life. You can go to the supermarket one day and know that the price of milk is going to be the same tomorrow, which wasn't when I was here before. It was just absolutely shocking. There was an alternate sort of money market, the blue market. That's pretty much dried up over the last year and then there's concerns about these economic shocks and the rise in poverty because many people who are already poor are paying some of the costs, supposedly of these reforms, I don't know enough about the data to comment with authority, but the people that I speak to, tend to welcome this end to runaway inflation and are both hopeful and fearful about what's to come. But that's been something that's universally seen as a positive in just a year's time.

Sure. You raise a lot of interesting themes in just that, one question. But the short answer is that our class is called Covering Religion. We are a graduate seminar in the journalism school. The whole purpose of the class is to equip young, ambitious journalists with the skills to write about complex issues that intersect with religion and faith in the public square effectively. I come from a very liberal background. Many from my background want to be in a world beyond faith. They see faith as this vestigial organ of the human species that is magical thinking. But it is a feature of our shared experience, whatever you think. And I think what you see in many media is that there's a lack of religious literacy to many issues like, here in the United States, at least metaphorically, where we're both based, the media misses a lot of big stories, because of their lack of literacy around faith. Not as sort of, "What do I believe? Or what are the tenets of Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or Christianity", but because of a lack of awareness of how faith intersects and shapes social movements, including political movements.

For example, the big story that everyone missed in the 2016 presidential election in the US was the role of faith communities in electing President Donald Trump to the surprise victory. Now everybody knows this is obvious. One of the big stories that I've worked on my entire life, I happen to also be Palestinian. I was born and raised in the States. I come from a Palestinian Christian community, the oldest Christian community in the world. I've lived back and forth in the States and in Palestine and traveled to Israel, Palestine well over 150 times. It is the role of faith in shaping that conflict over the last 100 years, as well as American politics and even British politics. It's the Holy Land, after all. And so, in looking in the public square, in the conversations we were having around this seemingly intractable conflict, which unfortunately has just disintegrated into horrific proportions, unimaginable suffering today, particularly in Gaza, that threatens all Israelis and Palestinians, the region and I would argue, the world, and I'm sure we'll get into that more. But so, that's another issue in which this dimension was missing.

So long story short, about 7 years ago, Ari needed a guest speaker for this class covering religion that he'd been teaching for many years to equip young journalists to write with nuance around these complex issues in the public square. He had heard about me and my work, and he wanted me to come in and speak about the role of certain communities on the ground in Israel-Palestine. We got to know each other and then he asked me, surprisingly, to co-teach the class with him as an adjunct because of a lot of experience that I have with the media, with Israel-Palestine, with faith communities around the world, and with some other issues. Seven years ago we joined forces and that led us to you that one day after things started to fall apart on Columbia's campus.

Well, I think it's true and I think it's part of the story. This is something I know to be true from personal experience and from the conversation that we're having today. It's also true from the data and particularly among younger people, that there is more curiosity, particularly in the United States and in other parts of the world around sort of more expansive views of faith. When you pull some people about it, they tend to indicate that sometimes they may define themselves as a particular religion. But when you dive more deeply into what their actual beliefs are about that faith, they may have a more expansive view on how they relate to the other, the religious other, the non-religious other, than many interpretations of their faith might have you believe.

I also think it's true that people tend to be more curious. And so I'm going to go into some more, difficult data and perspectives in a second. But, we are leading with hinting at some quite divisive issues and some horrific realities, like what I would call and most experts would call an ongoing genocide in Gaza that we need to address.

But, if we're looking I want to start with this point of departure is that most people, even quite devout people in their particular faith tradition or their particular political worldview, are in fact curious. Most people are just like you, and they're just like me. We have really well formed opinions about things, and we take our beliefs seriously, and so we act on them. A lot of these issues that we term as divisive and in the world, we, end up falling on one side or the other, but it doesn't mean that we're necessarily there comfortably, or that we're not open to learning and what's missing in the world is a space for curiosity and a space for deep engagement, and a space for people who have not had the ability to experience the reality or the perspective of others to do that, I think.

But at the same time, I said that this part of the story that you articulated is true. There are other true stories too. We're living in a moment of unparalleled lived uncertainty for much of the world. What's happening in Argentina, where I am today, is an upheaval that hasn't been seen for decades. We've seen the data on religiosity in the public square, very clear. So at the same time as there's been this trend towards an openness, in the United States, it's called the nuns, people who tend to be spiritual, but actually, in fact, don't affiliate with any religious tradition whatsoever. It's the largest growing segment among younger Americans in terms of religiosity. We're also seeing an entrenchment.

One group that I've done a lot of work with and studied around, I say group because it's a very loose term for evangelicals. Even the definition of what it means to be evangelical in America is hotly contested. But whatever definition you look at, it's true that many people, particularly since the rise of Trumpism as a force in America, have left evangelicalism as evangelical, and have become associated with the political movement of Trump. But it's also true, most recent data was 2% no longer defined as evangelicals, but 6% of Americans now define as evangelical, in part because of Trumpism. So there's this reverse trend that you see in the states of people becoming, in fact, more religious. On that specific data, what's fascinating is as you dive into it and you ask them specific questions related to faith, and often people who now define themselves as evangelical don't go to church and don't hold some of what sociologists would define as the core beliefs of evangelicalism broadly conceived.

We're seeing these trends around the world. We're seeing trends in Latin America to much more sort of dogmatic forms of religion. We're seeing in the United States, for example, among minority groups like Latino Americans, who, many come from Catholic backgrounds but are espousing sort of more evangelical beliefs. We see throughout the global South, and sub-Saharan Africa, a rise in religiosity and expressions of religiosity that are not ecumenical as sort of laid out.

I think there are a number of potential sociological reasons to explore this. I definitely don't have all the answers. I don't think anybody does. But I do think, it's both a result and a cause of this rising uncertainty that we see in the world. One last thing, I just want to bring this back to Israel-Palestine is that, we're talking a lot about faith and religiosity right now, but oftentimes with religion, it's not about religion. Israel-Palestine, for example, is not a religious conflict. The term conflict is hotly contested, too, as we can go into, momentarily. But it's about land. It's about power. And religion is often used and fuels different sorts of tribal perspectives about who we are and who has a right to be here. But people aren't sitting debating about interpretations over religious text, or my religion is better than yours, I mean, people say this, but that's not what's driven this. What's driving Israel-Palestine and what's driving so many other conflicts in the world that are often talked about in highly religious terms, is the quest for power.

Yeah. Well, that's a great question. I wish he were here with us right now to have this conversation, share his perspective. Very briefly, I'll say there's a couple principles that I think we apply. One, we knew each other for years before October 7th and worked together. But we came together not to have difficult conversations together. We came together to train better journalists. That's a shared purpose that we had.

Sure. Ari is a former New York Times religion reporter for, I think, 20 odd years. He's observant Jewish. He defines himself as a Zionist, meaning that he supports the idea of a Jewish state in Israel. I'm Palestinian, as you know, from this conversation in the background, and I am not a nationalist. I'm not a Zionist. I believe in equality, fundamental human rights for everyone, Jews, Palestinians, Muslims, Christians, Israelis. I don't think there's a good future for any Israeli or Palestinian, without a sound reality for everyone there. And in its obsession, Zionism, this idea of a Jewish safe haven in Palestine, the birthplace of Judaism. I don't think anybody could argue with that historically, I think, what Zionism became and not theoretically meant and means the disenfranchisement and oppression of millions of Palestinians. And I think that's wrong. We can go into that history a little bit more. But I'm very clear about my positions, which do not align with Ari's at all. In teaching this class, we are not debating in front of our class, but we do have a shared purpose in the class. And that is we both recognize that media and there's not one media, there are a variety of different media outlets that need to do a better job of reporting in general. We have a framework called empathetic objectivity that we employ. We want our journalists to be able to, when they write and say, if I were interviewing you Hitendra, and I really disagreed with your perspective and my article disagreed with your perspective, I would want you to read my article or see my piece. And despite my point of view, say, "Hey, wait a second. You got that just right. That's exactly me. You got me better than I got myself". So we want to make sure as a first step, it's not the last step. And particularly if you were trying to manipulate the facts or whatever, but as a first step of journalism to make sure that the communities we're talking about, which are not our own, feel that their positions are fairly represented. Otherwise, media and journalism is not a conversation in the public square about difficult and fraught topics, which it needs to be if we're going to effectively address them.

Well, yes. Objectivity. How can you be objective in the media? What does that mean? That's a big question, particularly with the rise of social media. Did we ever have objective media? I think many people would say no. It's always been biased to some extent. People often ask, what's one news source I can read on Israel-Palestine to get the truth? The reality is that, I think there's some that are better than others that I would recommend you to, spoiler alert, none of them based in the United States. But, I would say on any issue now that so-called mainstream media that has a lot of financing has specific points of view. I think it's important for consumers to be aware of that. And I think it's frustrating for many consumers when we want to learn about our world. We recognize the importance of journalism, and everything feels like it's a manipulation in some sense, what facts are chosen, what how facts are presented, who's interviewed, how perspectives are presented. And, we think that the intervention of our class extends far beyond covering religion. The principles that we use, the frameworks that we use, extend throughout potential media, if you get to that baseline where, for example, if you come from a conservative Christian evangelical Republican community in Arkansas, like my co-founder at Telos, the organization I also run, like if you read an article that I, a liberal Palestinian-American from California who lives in New York wrote, you would want to see, this is a fair representation of my worldview. That's an important baseline, because otherwise we're not having a real conversation. We are manipulating people as pawns in this story that we want to tell about the world and about our role in it.

I think they're not journalists if they can't do this. For journalists, there's a little maxim that says, if you're talking to two people and one interviewer says it's raining outside, the other says it's sunny, you want to show their perspectives, but your job as a journalist is, there's an objective fact there. Is it raining? Or is it sunny? Well, they present these two different perspectives. So you've got to be skilled in both. You've got to be able to work with both narrative and fact. And that's a journalist's role.

A couple of quick things. One, I'm so in alignment with the core argument that if your objective is to actually convince other people of your position, why hide anything? If my position is thought out, I should be able to defend it in the public square. And two, if the public square is important for the advancement of our collective social good, we need to be able to welcome many perspectives, even those we find injurious and harmful to the public square, which is something that we just don't really do well at the current moment.

The counterargument to that, though, is that, we may no longer have a shared purpose here, because part of the manipulation of fact and argument is to build your tribe. It's to build your team. That's a power game. When we've lost this deep commitment to the practice of democracy, which says that there's more to my story, even though Ari and I, for example, are very rooted in our positions, which some would say are oppositional. And I hope Ari is going to change his position. And I think he's objectively wrong. And I think this position has visited untold horror upon my family and ultimately on all Israelis and Palestinians. I understand it comes from a very deep and good, well-meaning place. It's very much rooted in his worldview. But, I also know that my position is as deeply convicted in it. It's not the only perspective, right? And so, I think what we're losing right now is this commitment to say that as deeply convicted as I am in my worldview, there's a story that's larger than all of us. There's a common good. My well-being does not have to come at the expense of your well-being. And the only way that we can develop that and find that space where we both can flourish, where we can know dignity, freedom, agency to become whatever we want is together, not in our respective silos.

In America right now, it's like we don't share the same realities. We don't even share the same facts anymore. Our class is not a silver bullet to this at all. I don't think there is anything but what I will say, why I've been willing to go to places that some from my community, and my communities are quite critical of is that if we can't do this on our campuses, if we can't model and learn how to have a public square on our campus, if we can't orient ourselves to the true goal of democracy, which is maximum human flourishing, even for those that we really deeply disagree with, it's no wonder that our institutions outside of our campuses are failing. We have to be able to do this on our university campuses, and we have to learn how to do this in our personal lives, in our business relationships. And if we do that, my contention and belief, despite all the evidence to the contrary in today's world, is that there is more happiness, more wealth. There's a better reality for all of us, for us today and for future generations. This is the path towards true safety, not simply vanquishing our opponent who will never go away, but who will reform in a different expression at some point.

So I think what you're getting at is deeply true, but I think that it also hints at this other sort of negative zeitgeist of the moment, which is that we've lost this sense of shared purpose. And without that, I think we're in a very dangerous place.

Absolutely! One of the techniques that really works is immersive shared experience. There's so much data around this. You mentioned also that I run this nonprofit which I founded after leaving the negotiations, in 2009, and that nonprofit intuition around peacemaking or building social movements to maximize common good. It came from the realization that when people came on the ground in Israel-Palestine and saw the reality for themselves, not just the reality of Palestinians, but of Israelis, they were transformed. They saw things differently. They saw their relationship to the place differently. It was easy before to put people in boxes. But once you have personal relationships and personal experience, often experiences that don't reconcile with one another, it becomes a completely different conversation. It's not algebra in your head. It's not, "Okay, this is the correct answer. These people are evil. These people are good. End of story."

And so, what we set out to do and Telos, for example, we work on a variety of seemingly intractable issues now. But our first and primary issue was America's relationship to Israel-Palestine. We had a point of view that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this situation that many people call apartheid, whatever you want to call it, persisted for so long, almost a century, in part because of American foreign policy. And unlike other foreign policy issues in America, say, North Korea's nuclear weapons, this is an issue that a lot of it functioned much more like a domestic issue, like, health care or guns or immigration reform or something like that, meaning that everyday Americans really cared about it and organize around it and so constituency matter. And so, the idea was like we were in this space then and now that you're either pro-Israel or pro-Palestine, not a space focusing on the reality which that, no Palestinians or Israelis will know security, freedom, dignity, equality, equity long term, unless everyone does. There has to be the centering of human rights before and beyond any conversation of politics. And if you can just write one group of people off it is not human and not deserving of equal rights. It's just going to be a perpetuation of a violent system which produces violence. What we wanted to do to break this binary is to allow American leaders and their communities from target communities to see the reality in its full complexity to break them out of their own sets of stereotypes. And we used immersive experience as a tool which has been highly effective on a limited test case. We haven't done this unfortunately, to scale yet.

But similarly at Columbia, this is one of the reasons why Ari and I connected. When he founded this Covering Religion course more than 20 years ago, he said, "Hey, we got to get journalists in the field. This reporting cannot be abstract. We've got to get them out of their comfort zones. They have to experience something. They have to feel something. Your feelings are not things to be afraid of. They're their data points in the journey of how you manage and how you understand the world and your relationship to it, whether as a professional or just as a human being." We have students from all over the world in each of our classes. They come with a variety of different perspectives. Last year and this year, we've been going to Ireland, Northern Ireland, and we travel to other parts of the world as well. But it's this immersive experience that gets people out of their shoes. Because once you're confronted with a reality, positive or negative, that you don't fully understand. Wow! It can be life changing. And then when you do that with a cohort of your peers who bring all their different perspectives, and you see how they're wrestling with it and you wrestle together, then you get to that place of shared reality. You have a shared set of facts. That fact is the immersive experience that you share, that you have to be accountable to. And you're having a conversation that's based on a shared set of facts, rather than sort of these abstract caricatures of what I think or what I feel. What did we experience together and how do we negotiate that? So the shared experience model is something that takes a lot of investment, people say, but it's the thing that works. It's a thing that absolutely works for people to have real conversations about things that matter. It gets us out of our space of certainty and into a space of curiosity, which is exactly what you want and need in the public square.

Well, I love that term inner shift. I think that's so key. In our broader culture, we see active activism or engagement often in two poles. One is this outer, what you do in the world, you're out there and you're protesting, you're advocating in the United States, for example, in the halls of Congress. And that's one important aspect of the work of activism in the world. Congress determines how we spend a multitrillion dollar budget and where we send weapons. You know, all of these things that affect our shared reality and are done with our shared resources. But I think this work is also deeply internal. And so there's sort of the ascetic model in which, the other pole is, it's only internal, that you just kind of retreat from the world. And this is often an expression of some aesthetic forms of religion in which you just do this inner work and by healing and purifying internally, this has an external effect.

I would say both are true at the same time. It's this inner shift and that is necessary for a healthy outer shift. This connects again to this core idea that keeps coming back to its purpose, like, why are we doing this? Something that we talk a lot about at Telos is a concept which can sound a little loosey goosey to some is mutual flourishing, this idea that our well-beings are intertwined. I absolutely believe that from a biological and scientific perspective to a sociological perspective. What that means is that we need to actually recognize that building a world in which everyone has maximum agency is all of our responsibility. Responsibility is not just outer, it's also inner. Now, that sounds really abstract.

I want to give an example that your listeners may be familiar with, sort of a meta example, and that is the evolution of LGBTQ rights in America. Now obviously this is a fraught issue at the moment, particularly with respect to trans rights. But same sex marriage, for example, is broadly accepted among most Americans, even religious Americans who do not believe, based on their religious convictions, that same sex marriage should be recognized at least within their churches, or houses of worship. The reason for that shift comes back to the reality that over a period of decades, there was a lot of work by LGBTQ Americans to, "come out." It made an issue personal. These were now people's sons, daughters, sisters, sometimes spouses. There was this awakening, if you will, to reality in which people had to be confronted with like, "Okay, well, maybe this is my daughter and maybe I hold these things to be true, but I love my daughter. And there's something more here that's more important to me than sort of a literal interpretation of the scripture, even if I might actually still believe it's true. I want to have a relationship with this person. I want them to be happy. I want to show them love. I want them to show me love. And I don't want to deny them an ability to love in a way that maybe I don't want to love and that I don't fully understand". And so there were a number of inner shifts that collected over a period of decades and have resulted in a reality in which people are holding a number of things that don't actually reconcile intentions. Many people were saying, "Well, yeah, I don't necessarily believe in gay marriage, same sex marriage. I don't think the Bible condones this. I'm not sure this is a real marriage in a biblical sense. I'm not sure what happens to these people after we die." And at the same time, "Well, I love this person deeply. I think they deserve to be able to make the same choices. And maybe God has a bigger plan than I can understand from my limited understanding or reading of my scripture."

What was critical, there was a number of inner shifts on a massive scale, on a sociological scale. So it wasn't just my story, it wasn't just your story. I think this is an important example to bring out, because you can't have the outer shift without the inner shift. The inner shift is what drives the outer shift. But if you don't take action afterwards, if people don't speak up, if they don't say, "Hey, wait a second, I may not be for this or actually now I am for this because I see things differently". If people stay silent, if there is no outer shift, nothing changes in the world. You need both.

I think that's true. I also honestly question that right now. I think there are a couple of counter arguments to that. I mentioned earlier and I know it's controversial for some of your listeners, but this is my perspective and it's shared by almost every human rights advocate around the world that there's an ongoing genocide, which we're seeing live streamed happening in Gaza right now. All the empathy in the world hasn't been able to stop any of those bombs. There's a power dynamic here at play. Maybe one day and for future generations, but it feels, for people of my generation who grew up thinking that the atrocities that we learned about in World War II were historic and would never be repeated. And, there's been so many genocides since and this one, happening now, and it's the sense of helplessness and the rise of technology, which seems to separate and atomize us in particular ways. There are all of these fears and so, I think there's one perspective that would say that, "Well, maybe, perhaps, empathy is effective for evolution, for only for those who we consider human. And yet there's a whole segment and set of society that we still, for whatever reason, do not deem as worthy of human rights, whether in Gaza, horrifically, for two millennia, often Jewish people, people in the global South, whatnot." And so there's this perspective there.

I think there's another perspective which is less dark. But I think it is important to bring to the table. This is one view of history, which some historians have proposed over the decades. But this idea of the pendulum swinging and we see the world move from one extreme to the other, almost predictably, when you take a step back and you see these larger patterns. What we may be in right now is this retrenchment. Whatever the case, I think I'm particularly concerned at this moment because, in the United States, for example, we've never been a perfect country. And we have so many flaws which we can talk about and spend another podcast talking about. But it felt at a time at least, there was an aspiration to want to have this thing called America in which we the people, all the people, no more freedom. Now, it feels so divided that we're living in different realities. If you're on that side of the divide, you're not even human, much less American, right? I think polarization is a symptom, not the problem. It's like we've lost this shared purpose.

I think on a global scale, this is something as a former human rights lawyer, I care deeply about, I'm not going to get too political, but the Biden administration, and a registered Democrat, whatever has kind of talked about Ukraine and the world and China in terms of like international human rights and preserving the rules based order and whatnot. And yet, we've lost this aspiration to human rights, and we're dismantling all of these post-World War II institutions which were deeply flawed. I can tell you how flawed they are from years of personal experience, but at least there was this idea that there needed to be a foundation in the world, and that foundation needed to recognize that every human life has value. And so we had to build a world system, this institutionalized interdependence that we'd agree there's a baseline that we would never at least aspirationally depart from. We're losing that aspiration. And now, these things such as, like peacemaking and diplomacy and human rights, they feel like cruel jokes to much of the world's population. And that's really scary for me, because if we're going into a dark time and we need to swing back to something more expansive, we have to find a way to recognize that our best individual futures, particularly for the younger generations and future generations, involve a good future for all. And as cliché as that sounds, I think ultimately it's true. But we seem to be moving so quickly away from that. I don't know how empathy is going to get us back in this moment. Maybe it will. Maybe these are seeds worth planning for future years, but I think things are going to get a lot more difficult before they get better.

In the last 30 years? I have not come across that statistic. So I'm really fascinated. Two dates come to mind. One may seem counterintuitive, but 2001 and then 2020.

Well, I have to be honest that I don't know. Right now I feel particularly adrift. I feel like a lot of my work has been a failure in the sense that we haven't been able to stop what we're seeing today. And, it's been predicted, I worked on, for example, Gaza disengagement when Israel pulled out of the Gaza Strip in 2005 and, everything that you're seeing today was predicted for many years. I spent years of my life, actually, 2005 to 2008, predicting that exact scenario that you see today. And so it's not a surprise. The real intelligence failure is why do we know bad things are going to happen and the world is set up to be like, "You can't rule over millions of people indefinitely and don't excuse what happened on October 7th is some of the horrors that we saw there. But nothing excuses what happened to Palestinians every day before for decades or every day tense, right?" War crimes don't justify war crimes.

I receive your question in a moment where I have to be really honest that I feel particularly, bereft of hope as an adjective. There's a wonderful Palestinian theologian actually named Mitri Raheb. He says that, "Remember, hope is what you do. It's not an adjective, it's a verb." So right now, when I look out in the world, I don't see the rays of light that I did at other points in my life. I have to be honest that I feel particularly uncertain. But I have to remember that there are patterns, just as when you plant seeds in soil, things grow and hope is not about what I feel, it's about what I do. That's the real ray of light.

I think, in responding to you specifically, I have to say, intellectually, not emotionally, where I land we do have quite a bit of untapped agency, all of you and I and everyone listening to this podcast right here. The examples that you cite actually, I think highlight that in an indirect fashion. What happened after September 11th or October 7th in Israel is, there was a lot of unity where there was deep division for this moment. Unfortunately, I think many parties saw this as a resource to be exploited. This is what happened post 9/11 with US foreign policy. We went and invaded Iraq and completely destabilized the Middle East. Again, a terrible chapter in the Middle East, setting up what you see today more than 2 decades later, which Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11, as we know, and Saddam Hussein and whatnot.

Yeah. And also that unity can be used as a destructive force. It's not just that we were unified, but any dissent was considered un-American. After October 7th, I was writing and doing things on October 8th. And, war crimes do not justify war crimes. That was really controversial, saying exactly where this was headed. I told you, I spent three years of my life, 2005 to 2008, talking about Gaza 2020, the scenario. The United Nations wrote a report in 2012 which you can Google called Gaza 2020, predicting this scenario. If Israel continued to restrict the movement and freedom of millions of people, it wasn't that there was an easy way out, but it was headed to a very dark place. You can't rule over millions of people indefinitely and expect a good result. That's structural violence in and of itself.

After October 7th, anybody was like, Israel has a right to self-defense. Of course, Israel has a right to self-defense. Every country has a right to self-defense. Palestinians, as an occupied people, have a right to self-defense. These are sacred rights. It's not a question of whether you have these rights. It's how we use them. Is targeting civilians ever justified? No, it is absolutely not. That's prohibited. Absolutely, under international law. And I would say from moral analysis as well, whether it's a non-state act or a state act.

I wanted to bring back a very nuanced point here about "agency" because, I think, we're recording this now a week after the infamous assassination of the CEO of United Healthcare. Part of the story is the outpouring of indifference or even support for murder here. And I think this highlights a couple of things, both of why I feel like I'm such a failure right now, but also sort of like where the agency lies. Because if we knew what was going to happen in Gaza, if we knew, for example, 9/11, an absolutely horrific moment in our nation's history. Of course, we have to react to this moment like there's nothing that justifies 9/11. And, in the US, there were these rumblings for many decades, given our military presence in the Middle East and how we were exerting that on in the Middle East. I'm not trying to make a clear analogy between all of these things, but the healthcare system, every American I know with good health insurance, like we may like our health insurance because we've got better than the alternatives, but we hate the health insurance industry. Does that mean I believe that murder is the way out? No, but what it gets to is the fact that a lot of what we see happen, these violent, massive ruptures are not just predicted, they are predictable. And for whatever reason, we only choose to pay attention in moments of extreme violence. I think that comes back to us. It comes back to us and our responsibility. It comes back to how we organize and when we mobilize. If we only do something after the bomb goes off, like the institutions we've built. If we only condemn genocide after it's over, what are the institutions that we're building? And how are we going to build a more just, more free and more prosperous society for all? So it comes back to the set of questions that we don't have answers to, but that we have to figure out how do we build systems and behaviors and cultures that can anticipate these ruptures before they happen and really deal with these deeper questions, the deeper violence, the structural violence around us that eventually, like a tectonic plate will rupture at some point. Right now, I have to be honest, I'm a little concerned because now it seems like the only time people pay attention to Palestinians and now they do. This is the first time in my life where people around the world, in large measure, are like, "Wow! We're listening to the Palestinian story". They may not get it right, but a lot of people care. We have to be honest, it was a result of October 7th, this horrific terrorist attack.

Now, there might be a conversation about health care, or not, but there will probably be a rise in vigilantism around the United States after this assassination through this rising inequality. I think the obstacle that we may be facing is the fact that we live in an increasingly undemocratic society. It's more an oligarchy with democratic practices. And so, we've got to be creative in how we come together and build more resilient institutions that can promote individual responsibility, individual agency alongside collective well-being. These things should not be opposed. These things actually feed each other.

No, I think it's both and I think that perspective is absolutely foundational. At Telos, we developed a tool called The Principles and Practices of Peacemaking. It's got 6 principles, things that you need to focus on if you really want to work towards a goal of mutual flourishing, maximum agency, health, safety, dignity for as many people as possible. And it has 6 practices like how do you do that? It's not a perfect tool. It's a tool in evolution. But we drew on a lot of our experience in the field and then folks like Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. And also just local activists throughout history and contemporaneously. There are a couple of principles there that in our remaining time I want to pull out, that I think are helpful. There are 2 I want to mention in response to this and actually bring it back to healthcare as opposed to Israel-Palestine, because I'm an expert on Israel-Palestine. I'm not on health care. I'm just like everybody on this call. I'm a consumer. I'm an investor through my portfolios, whatnot and deeply concerned as a human being. The 2 practices, to get to this point.

The first is, the second practice, which is to hold competing perspectives and tension. The idea that multiple things may be true at the same time. I know you like data a lot. There's a great quote from Niels Bohr, the pioneer of quantum physics, about this. This was about the physical world, the subatomic world, not sort of the social world. He said, "The opposite of fact is falsehood. But the opposite of truth may very well be another profound truth." And so recognizing that when we're building this world that we live in and we're just these small points who have positionality. Guess what? Like when I'm talking to you, Hitendra, you may be saying something that is actually opposed to what I'm saying in a sense, but it may also be true. There's a great old story about this to illustrate this, I want to share two more illustrations. One is the story. Have you heard about the blind men and the elephants?

Very quick. A group of blind men walking through the forest, as they stumble along an elephant. One grabs a trunk. One grabs a tusk. One grabs a tail, one grabs the foot. And they're trying to figure out what this is, describing it to each other. And they start getting us into a fight about it. The reality is, there's an objective truth. There's an actual elephant, and they're all touching it, but they're truthfully describing different aspects of this larger truth. So again, it gets to this idea of the necessity when we're living in a reality that's much larger than ourselves, to hold truths that are larger than ourselves and recognize that not one of us owns the truth. This is particularly important in diplomacy and business just in our personal lives. Because I think what we tend to do is when we hear something that goes counter to what we know or believe to be true, we take it as an indictment of us or our beliefs. And it may not be. It may be somebody who's just sharing a completely different experience that is just as valid as ours from a different position.

Or maybe what I'm claiming may be completely true at the same time as what you're claiming to be true. And just because you have another vantage point where truth doesn't invalidate me, it's not about me. It's about something larger than both of us. I think it's important for us to constantly keep that in mind, that there is a larger truth that none of us can claim full ownership over, and we can only access it when you've got a perspective on the tale, and I've got a perspective on the trunk. The only way we can access that larger shared reality is through sharing of our truth. The whole truth. Nothing but the truth which may also be true alongside yours.

When you're asking about this larger truth, all these things may be true at the same time, like when the health care industry is broken to perhaps we have a fetishization with preserving life. I know from personal experience, I shepherded my mom in the US and then my dad died in Ireland where my brother lives. And it was a completely different experience. That's a whole other podcast. But one of the things I recognized then, particularly with my mom, this was back in 2014. Many of my friends my age, their parents are still living. So I went through these end of life processes and how reluctant we are to have a conversation about what I'd say as a new stage of life, which is Twilight, and the fact that most deaths are at a time of our choosing and nobody wants to talk about it. And so it may also be true that we're investing incredible resources to prolonging life and quality of life, which is not healthy and that our system is completely broken. It's not optimizing health where the United States has the lowest life expectancy of any developed nation, yet we have the highest per capita spending on health care resources. What we're maximizing is profit, not human life. And so, all the conversations around empathy and much needed conversation about end of life care and what we do, which I wish I had when I was younger before being confronted with it and divided within our own family about how we manage these things. All of those things need to happen at the same time, and they can be true at the same time. And our healthcare industry is great at maintaining profits. And it's not necessarily the CEO's fault, even though this is the business that he went into. He doesn't deserve to be murdered, obviously. But that we're investing and that we have in retirement portfolios that are invested in these companies, and we want to return on all of it. So there's a systemic issue that we need to address, as well as the empathy gap and understanding our own mortality and reality and our own complicity in this.

The second practice I wanted to highlight is really important, it's the fifth practice out of the principles and practices of peacemaking. It's called self-interrogation. What that means is, peacemaking is both internal and external. It's a holistic practice. But there's a couple of important things from self-interrogation. One is the greatest power agency I have is within me and within the communities that I'm a part of. It is so easy to point out the problem, "Hey you, Hitendra, it's you. It's your community. You're the problem. You need to change". Whereas in reality, that's the place where I have the least amount of agency and control. And in fact, when I understand what my complicity and my agency and whatever problem it is, whether it's Israel-Palestine, whether it's health care, whatever it is, when I assume responsibility over what I control, that's when I have the greatest power. And so it's this internal process, internal to me as a person. It's internal to me as a community to start focusing on, how can I write this. The interesting thing with it, and, you look at somebody like Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr., when they start doing this internally in their community and they start living according to their principles, guess what? Other people start taking notice. Not to bring politics back into this, but I'll say as a New Yorker, I've been con-founded for years. I don't understand this as sort of "Liberal New Yorker", that we live in the wealthiest city in the history of the world, and we have liberal leadership at every level of government. And, there are these progressive ideals about education and health care. And yet, you walk into our subway, it's falling apart like we've got terrible health care outcomes, terrible education outcomes. Unless you're wealthy and you can pay for your kids to go to school. We should be succeeding here. This shouldn't be about us talking about Mississippi State that I know well, through my domestic work that's often 50th in these rankings and blaming them for everything, when we've got all the resources and supposedly the leaders, there's something that we've got to focus on internally. For those, who would align at least sort of broadly with some liberal ideals, I bet you that if we in our liberal communities or our conservative communities, if we got really good at delivering on what we say we believe in, when we have the resources, a lot of people would take notice. So self-interrogation on a personal level, at a communal level is the one of the most important steps of peacemaking. That's why we put advocate as the last of the 12 steps. The other work really prepares you. It's the analysis, as you know, the first, the principles are analyzing. What you need to be focused on in order to work towards mutual flourishing. The practices are how you get there. And the last practice is advocate. And that's consistent, by the way, with all of the names that you cited and we've been talking about through these storied saints or whatever. They did a lot of internal work within themselves and with their community before they went out into the world to do anything.

Sure. We have some sort of specific target audience, related to the issues that we work on. One is America's relationship to Israel-Palestine. Another is about our deep divisions around our American story and a program we call, *Restory*, which is diving deep into the history and the realities of America. We tend to focus on communities. Faith communities are a big focus, particularly Christians. We have some expertise with and then also artists and storytellers. We think culture is very much upstream from politics. And if we can't tell stories that point us towards each other, as opposed to away from each other, we're not creating this culture of mutuality, which is needed to confront and deal with some of these seemingly intractable issues.

We also do a lot of work with philanthropists and entrepreneurs as well, because capital is a key driver of all of this. I think people want to be awakened to their world and their surroundings. We have a number of trainings that we do around the principles and practice of peacemaking that, I'm sure colleagues could help with. We have that tool which is publicly available. You have a number of FAQs. We have a blog and a newsletter, and we also have a podcast, which I'm currently on sabbatical, so I can't make a formal offer, but I'd love for you to join our podcast and to share your knowledge and cross fertilize your knowledge with our community at some point.

Wow! I receive that, and it's deeply moving and humbling. And Hitendra, I, welcome your open and particularly giving spirit. I know there's a lot that we don't agree on, even though we don't know each other very well yet. And yet, I think this is kind of that spirit that we want to cultivate.

For me, part of the strength that I had, some of the most amazing parents, and I truly think they were saints. I'm not joking. I'm not a particularly faithful person, I'm not great at living up to my espoused values, and at least to the extent that they were. But one of the ways that I'm privileged is meeting people like you and so many extraordinary people all over the US, all over the world, in Israel, Palestine. Who for whatever reason, they don't accept the way the world is as it is. They believe it can be different and they live differently into it, and they're everywhere. We know the name of Gandhi, for example, who went on this incredible internal process and then used this path of nonviolent resistance in South Africa and in India to liberate India from its colonizers. This action is so profound, and that's what I'm wrestling with for the next chapters. Hopefully I have many chapters left, <knock on wood>. But, you know, this final reflection is that I'm holding these two things in contention, is that this moment feels so particularly urgent.

What I would say as an analogy, that it's like, we're in a building together and the building next door is on fire. There are children dying. There's a gas tank in the basement. It's about to explode. If it blows, we all die. But half of us are sitting here pretending that nothing is happening. The other half are sitting here arguing, "Well, who started it? Whose job is it to put it out? Who's going to be in control afterwards?" I'm like, yeah, these are all really important questions. I don't want to diminish those questions, but we need to put the fire out. For me, it's like an arms embargo for Israel. But I don't think that's going to happen. What do we do? I feel so frustrated at this moment because there's so many easy steps that could change the dynamic and important ways, and you may completely disagree with what I'm saying, but that's just where I am emotionally. But I think what I want to dive more into is, this idea of being that drop. And for me, I've been writing a book and I want to finish that book.

I think these next years for me need to be about as introverted as I am sharing some of what I think I've learned. Because I think this is what the human reality and the human experience is about. It's about connectivity. It's not about ego that I own anything. Any gift of knowledge or any more proximity to the divine or to than anyone else. It's recognizing that when we've been privileged to have these unique experiences like I have to hundreds of truly extraordinary people around the world that I have a responsibility to share what I believe that I've learned and to enter into that public square with greater conviction and not necessarily clarity. The two are not the same. Conviction is not clarity. Right now, we are in a time of real uncertainty. But I do believe the analogy that you gave for Mother Teresa, the pure drops of water. I believe Mitri Raheb, saying that hope is what you do or what my father, who was a theologian, would say, he would quote the psalmist and say to seek peace and pursue it. But then he'd go on and say, it is always the right thing to do, especially when it seems impossible, because these times, whether they're good or not, these times shall pass and there will be new opportunities that we can't imagine.

I want to leave with a very short poem, which for me is sort of like a calling for me and also for the listeners. It's from Hafez, the 14th century Sufi Muslim poet. He wrote, "The fool builds cages for everyone he knows, while the sage who has to duck her head when the moon hangs low, keeps dropping keys all night long for all the beautiful, rowdy prisoners." I love that so much because it reminds us of the stage of uncertainty. That story is both cage and key. The stories that we tell, how we engage each other, and there are those who want to build their team, want to consolidate power, and they get that power by keeping us caged or in their cages. And yet, we have power too. And that's to drop keys to keep turning towards each other, recognizing that there is a different way that we have not yet found or perfected yet, but we have these points of light, whether it's Gandhi or Mother Teresa or Doctor King from the future. But they're all around us today. They're you and me in various ways, people in our personal lives. And the key is to consistently turn towards each other, to recognize that my story is not the only story, that, in fact, our well-being is interdependent and that our safety, our dignity, our agency is interconnected. And yes, there are people who want to do bad things in the world and are doing those bad things in the world. But as more of us continually turn towards each other instead of away from each other, we can chart a different path together, and I want to be part of that. As disheartened and disillusioned as I may feel today, I think that's the only way forward, and I think that we may be in for some very, difficult years ahead that we cannot predict. But there will be a time after. And that's how we get to that time after. That's how the time after looks better than anything the world has ever known before.

Well thank you, Hitendra. I look forward to much collaboration in the months and years to come.