The Conversation We’ve Stopped Having

I live in Washington, DC. Politics is the local industry. And as a forum officer and moderator, with all the norms of confidentiality and non-judgment that YPO gives us, I found it nearly impossible to get people to talk about it. Not to argue about it. Just to talk about it. That struck me as a problem on three levels.

The first is personal. Politics is one of the places where I most want to understand people I respect, especially when we see the world differently. I suspected others felt some of that same curiosity, but you wouldn't know it from our conversations. The instinct was avoidance. Somewhere along the way, many of us had learned that the safest move was silence.

The second is about our role as leaders. Forum may be the most trusting room many of us ever sit in. If we struggle to discuss difficult civic questions there, despite having unusually strong tools for listening and vulnerability, what does that say about our ability to have those conversations anywhere else?

The third is broader. Political conversation in America increasingly happens in environments that reward performance rather than understanding. Most Americans seem to want little part of it. A Pew Research Center study found that roughly 70% of U.S. social media users rarely or never post about political or social issues. In an earlier analysis of Twitter, just 6% of U.S. adult users generated nearly three-quarters of all tweets about national politics.

The public political conversation, in other words, may tell us less about what Americans think than about who is willing to participate in it. And many of us find that conversation exhausting. In 2023, 61% of Americans told Pew that talking politics with someone they disagree with was generally “stressful and frustrating,” up from 50% four years earlier.

So we withdraw. But silence has consequences.

The nonprofit More in Common, in its Hidden Tribes research, grouped 67% of Americans into what it called the “Exhausted Majority”: people who disagree on plenty but are frustrated by polarization and more open to compromise and common ground.

And that withdrawal has another cost: the less we hear directly from one another, the more we fill in the blanks ourselves. More in Common's Perception Gap research found that Democrats and Republicans substantially overestimated how many people on the other side held views the study categorized as extreme.

When conversation disappears, we don't just lose connection. We can lose an accurate picture of one another. Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1800 that he had never considered “a difference of opinion in politics, in religion, in philosophy” sufficient reason to withdraw from a friend. Most of us probably agree. The harder question is: where do we practice it? That question led to BetweenUS.

The idea is simple: take the disciplines we already practice in Forum—listening before responding, asking instead of assuming, speaking from experience rather than labels—and apply them to civic disagreement. You choose a question you care about. You're matched with another YPO member whose perspective differs from yours. You meet privately on video for a structured conversation. The goal isn't to win or convert. It's to understand what shaped the other person's view.

Charles Ramat, YPO Big Apple Gold, described his conversation this way:

“Despite our opposing views, we discovered meaningful common ground, and I was struck by the sincere curiosity and respect my conversation partner showed for my beliefs.”

Charles Ramat, YPO Big Apple Gold

Jim Bellas, YPO Gold Washington DC, had a similar experience. He and his partner began with very different political and religious identities. By their second conversation, they had discovered shared experiences they never would have guessed from the labels—including that both had come to this country as young immigrants. His reflection ended with a line I love:

“We have a third Zoom date on our calendars.”

Jim Bellas, YPO Gold Washington DC

A third Zoom date. That's what curiosity can do when it's given a safe room.

YPO has already taught us how to have difficult conversations differently. Maybe it's time to use those skills on the conversation we've been avoiding.