Idiots Are Everywhere. Here’s How to Cope | Joshua Johnson | TED

00:04Idiots -- (Laughter) Are everywhere. (Laughter) Some people drive you right up the wall with their opinions, their attitudes, their politics. I dealt with all kinds of people in my 20-plus years as a broadcast journalist. Eventually, I found moderating tough conversations with whatever kind of difficult people you just thought of.

00:28Kind of simple to do -- not easy -- but simple. The trick is to go somewhere I know you'd rather not be. Closer. Distance makes things worse. I came up in public radio, trained by old-school journalists who taught me the art of neutrality. You neutralize your opinions, deaden your emotions, and you can get through most conversations without rolling your eyes.

00:52Generally, it worked, and it built me a strong reputation for fairness. But when the subject matter felt personal, neutrality felt phony. I used to host a national talk show on NPR called "1A," and in one of our early programs, I interviewed a descendant of Confederate soldiers.

01:10He argued that Confederate monuments should be historically preserved. Now as a Black man, I felt enormous pressure to remain neutral, so I decided I was just going to focus on his arguments instead of on him. His logic felt kind of flimsy, and I called him on it, and eventually he just folded and he said, “It really doesn’t matter what I say.”

01:30And the moment he said that, I knew I had failed. I may have had a point, but I missed a huge opportunity to really do my job. See, my neutrality allowed me to interrogate his beliefs, but the distance prevented me from seeing why he believed them.

01:49What if I had asked better questions like: "Who influenced you the most in forming these views?" Or, "Suppose we let all of these monuments and statues stand just as they are. What would that mean to you?" Getting his story might have shown me him behind his canned arguments.

02:07Grilling him changed nothing. It felt pointless. When you consider someone problematic, there's a better way to deal with them, keep your sanity and maybe even connect. And it sounds insane. Move closer. Not to embrace them, but to explore them, like a doctor studying a sample.

02:29You need a microscope, not a telescope. Doctors actually helped me learn this way before I became a journalist. As a teenager, I was part of a summer program for future doctors. Clearly it worked. And I found myself working with clinicians studying cancer and thrombosis and HIV, very serious conditions.

02:48I kind of naively expected them to be these crusading scientists, but they were just level-headed people doing their jobs. But there was a lesson in that level-headedness. See, I am not neutral about the cancers in our world: bigotry, hoaxes, political violence.

03:04I want them gone. However, as a journalist, I often had to deal with them in my clinic: “on-the-air.” I survived it by getting as close to those problems as I could and studying them like samples in a petri dish. In other words, I had to shift from neutrality to objectivity.

03:25And no, they're not the same. Objectivity is just when you park your emotions and learn without judgment. I don't have to like it, I'm just here to learn from it. Neutrality negates your opinions as if you have no judgments. Does anyone here honestly believe I have no opinions on race?

03:43(Laughter) Right? Now notice I said park your opinions. When you park your car, you don't abandon it in the garage. You're coming back for it. So you can choose when to focus inward on what you think, or outward on what you can learn. Of course, sometimes your car ain't where you left it, and maybe your opinions will move too.

04:05That maybe is why objectivity feels so vulnerable. That's why it works. That vulnerability is a sign of openness, and a conversation that's not open is pointless. But if you can stay open, amazing things can happen. Another time on NPR, I was interviewing a former Baltimore police officer who had become this fiery advocate for law enforcement reform.

04:29And he was going on and on, just a long rant in autopilot, just (vocalizing). And I was trying to stay objective and listening as best I could, when I thought I heard his voice waver just a little. And in that waver, I detected more than his rage.

04:47It sounded like trauma. So near the end of the interview, I mentioned, hesitantly, that he seemed traumatized by his experiences as a cop, and could he reflect on that. He said, "I put people in prison cells who are better people than me." Whoa!

05:09Sure enough, he went right back to his talking points, but it didn’t matter, because in that moment -- that sliver of his story -- his defenses dropped, and he shifted from being right to being real. Look, some people are just difficult, but we can deal with them more simply.

05:25Here are three tips to get you started. First, get the story, particularly the key decisions and the turning points. What someone believes is not as important as how they chose to believe it. Second, my NPR host pro tip: keep your questions short.

05:4310 seconds tops. Long questions can feel like a setup or like you're rambling. And third, use that mental microscope. Look as closely as you can. Remember, you don't have to like it, but learn from it. It is time to reconnect, even to the people you can't stand.

06:03But this time, we're going to make those connections count. You could learn a lot from an idiot. (Laughter) Especially if you resolve never to act like one. I really appreciate you all making time for me today. Thank you for listening. (Cheers and applause)