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𝙁𝙧𝙤𝙢 𝙇𝙖 𝙑𝙞𝙤𝙡𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙞𝙖 𝙩𝙤 𝘿𝙚𝙥𝙤𝙡𝙖𝙧𝙒𝙞𝙨𝙚: 𝙇𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙤𝙣𝙨 𝙞𝙣 𝙃𝙪𝙢𝙖𝙣𝙞𝙩𝙮
Recorded on September 10th, just hours before the shocking assassination of political influencer Charlie Kirk, this conversation feels hauntingly prophetic. Wilk Wilkinson and guest Phelosha Collaros confront the rise of political violence and the toxic rhetoric fueling it—through the lens of Colombia’s La Violencia and the lessons it holds for America today.
Phelosha’s family lived through Colombia’s La Violencia—a partisan civil war between liberals and conservatives that destroyed towns and lives. Her grandparents’ politically mixed marriage made them targets of both sides. From that painful legacy emerged a lifelong mission to prevent polarization from turning violent again—this time in America.
✅ What La Violencia teaches about how polarization escalates
✅ The danger of “conflict entrepreneurs” and outrage economies
✅ Why Colombia’s two-party system mirrors America’s current divides
✅ How social trust and belonging can rebuild civil society
✅ Interventions that can stop polarization before it turns violent
✅ The role of organizations like DepolarWise and Braver Angels in restoring humanity
Phelosha Collaros serves as Vice President for Board Governance and Strategic Outcomes at St. John’s College, one of America’s oldest institutions of civic education and civil discourse. Her TEDx Talk and her platform DepolarWise.com draw on her family’s experience during Colombia’s La Violencia, reminding us that political division is not new—but it is dangerous when left unchecked.
She also leads the Bridging and Civic Solutions Exchange on LinkedIn, connecting leaders across nonprofit, education, and civic sectors to collaborate on solutions that heal divides.
If you’ve ever felt that politics is tearing America apart, listen to this conversation.
You’ll hear why our greatest hope lies not in political victory, but in re-humanizing each other—starting in our own communities.
The majority of people are not as divided as the extremes would have us believe, and together we can build the trust needed for a thriving civil society.
Website: DepolarWise.com
LinkedIn Group: Bridging and Civic Solutions Exchange
Instagram: @depolar.wise
Organization: St. John’s College
If you believe a better America begins with better conversations, become part of the movement at BraverAngels.org and subscribe to Derate The Hate wherever you get your podcasts.
Because a better world begins with a better you.
The world is a better place if we are better people. That begins with each of us as individuals. Be kind to one another. Be grateful for all you’ve got. Make every day the day that you want it to be!
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The Derate The Hate podcast is proudly produced in collaboration with Braver Angels — America’s largest grassroots, cross-partisan organization working toward civic renewal and bridging partisan divides. Learn more: BraverAngels.org
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*The views expressed by Wilk, his guest hosts &/or guests on the Derate The Hate podcast are their own and should not be attributed to any organization they may otherwise be affiliated with.
[00:00:00:00] Wilk Wilkinson: This conversation was recorded on September 10th, 2025. Just hours before the shocking assassination of political influencer Charlie Kirk. What you'll hear today isn't about one tragedy. It's about the patterns that make tragedies like this possible. My guest, Felicia ColorOS, knows those patterns all too well. Her family lived through Colombia's La Violencia and the parallels to what's happening in America today are impossible to ignore. Welcome back, my friends, for the Derate the Hate podcast. I'm your host, Wilk Wilkinson, your blue collar sage calming outrage and helping to navigate a world divided by fog and those who would spread that fear, outrage and grievance. The D Rate the Hate podcast is proudly produced in collaboration with Braver Angels, America's largest grassroots cross. partisan organization working towards civic renewal. This podcast amplifies the mission that we share to foster a more respectful and united America where civic friendship thrives even when we disagree. Each week, through the power of story, conversation, and connection with incredible guests, we work to build bridges instead of barriers, not to change minds on the issues, but to change how we see one another when we differ. Because friends, it really is about bettering the world one attitude at a time. We did not create the hate, but together we can Derate the Hate. So be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Share it with a friend and visit Braver angels.org to learn how you can get involved in the movement to bridge the partisan divide. Friends, I am so incredibly grateful that you have joined me for another powerful Derate the Hate episode. So let's get to it. We recorded this episode on September 10th, unaware that just hours later, our nation again would be forced to confront the horror of political violence. The news of Charlie Kirk's assassination shook many of us, not only for its loss of life, but for what it says about the deep fractures running through the fabric of our nation. My guest today, Phelosha Collaros, understands that kind of fracture in the most personal way. Her Colombian family lived through La Violencia, a brutal partisan civil war between Liberals and Conservatives that left more than 200,000 people dead. Her grandparents politically mixed marriage meant danger in every single town because every town was red or blue. Now serving as vice president for board governance and strategic outcomes at Saint John's College and as the founder of depolarize.com, Felicia has made it her mission to help America learn from Columbia's past, to recognize how words become walls and how unchecked rhetoric can turn into real world carnage. Today, we explore what drives polarization. Why outrage entrepreneurs profit from conflict and division, and how we can still build a civil society grounded in trust, belonging, and our common humanity. This isn't just a history lesson. It's a warning. And if we're willing to listen, a roadmap to a better future. Stick around for this incredible conversation with my friend Phelosha Collaros. Here we go. Phelosha Collaros, thank you so much for joining me here on the Derate the Hate Podcast. It's a great pleasure to see you today.
[00:04:18:02] Phelosha Collaros: Oh, it's a pleasure to see you. Well, thank you so much for having me.
[00:04:22:00] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah. This is this is a treat. I get to speak with another one of my friends. That is, I believe you're a gold member with with Braver Angels, right? It's.
[00:04:31:05] Phelosha Collaros: Yeah. President circle man. Well, they were the first, when I was seeking an organization or any solutions to what was happening in our country. I had a board member at my own organization. Turned me on to Braver Angels, and it was a lifeline. And so I've just been, you know, a supporter ever since.
[00:04:51:00] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah. That's wonderful. Or I don't, I don't know where I got gold member from, but, President circle. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I mean, I just as good gold member of President circle. It's the important thing is you're part of us. You're one of the one of the people who is has seen the great value in Braver Angels. And what we bring to this space. You're part of this movement. And and this movement for you, Phelosha, is is a little bit more. I think there's a deeper genesis for you in this, this depolarization thing than, than others might, might be able to grasp because this has been part of your family for generations. And, and we'll get into that a little bit. And then I also want to get into learn more about your organization, DepolarWise and things like that. But let's start off, Phelosha, with with your story and your family's story and how that started a couple generations ago in Colombia.
[00:05:56:18] Phelosha Collaros: Absolutely. Yeah. You might say that my relationship to depolarization is hereditary. And, and, that really, I kind of drew on my heart to pull me toward the work, but I would say the first part of the journey, I didn't know much about my family's history in Colombia. I think as many immigrant families do, you come to America from a place that's challenged, you know, maybe has political instability or issues, and you want to start over, start fresh. And, my mother was that type of person. She didn't really talk a lot about the past in her country. And so it wasn't until she started getting concerned in, about 2014, 2015, seeing a shift that, it was hard to put her finger on, that she started to talk about some of the concerns of synergies that she felt between the countries she had left, and now her new home country. You know, a lot of immigrants from from challenged areas in the world, what they want is for their kids to be safe, right? And their their families to be safe and prosperous. And so I think it was a real, it was a real wake up call for her when she started to see some of the markers that were similar here with what she had, experienced, although she was a very young child in Colombia, when La Violencia, which is what we're talking about, happened. So it was, you know, kind of a multi-year civil war between the liberals and conservatives in Colombia. Their parties are just called right. What? They are right. The Liberal Party in the Conservative Party and her parents, my grandparents were, in a mixed political marriage. Right. So my grandma was, my grandfather was a liberal, and they fell in love and got married in a time of kind of relative, political lull in the country, you know, after, a, small, war with Peru when everybody kind of rallied around Colombian citizenship and they, you know, they met and they and they had this, this, connection that was beyond their political identities. But as that faded, that kind of unity faded and the civil conflict started to rise again. They found it very challenging to keep their families safe, towns, politicized. So you would be in a liberal town or conservative town, and eventually it would be known that they weren't of the same political party. So the family really wasn't safe anywhere. At the end.
[00:08:28:18] Wilk Wilkinson: So that is horrific. Just just thinking about that. And when I, when we when we discuss the parallels that are happening in the United States to, to other places that have gone through these, these strifes, you talk about the, the kind of small moment of unity after the fight with Peru and, and then and then how things started to progress and, and people I think a lot of people in the United States don't fully grasp the idea of how that can happen. I mean, as right now, I mean, as of the date of this recording, which will be a number of weeks before this, this will air. But but as of the date of this recording, tomorrow is the anniversary of 911, nine, 11, 2001 was one of the most horrific attacks on our homeland in in anybody's recollection. Right. And anybody that's, that's living today or most people that are living today cannot think of a time in this country where we've been attacked and, and this thing and I think about the unity that we saw after 911 as a country. We all came together. People were driving around flags on their windows and things like that. And it's USA against the the, the, these, these evil entities that came to our shores. And then we've seen over the past 25 years how the right wing of our country and the left wing of our country have have started to become more extreme and push themselves further away from from the middle. And, and and I, I get so concerned about stories like your family’s Phelosha, where where in Colombia. And for people who are listening to this and aren't familiar with the the La Violencia time period in Colombia, think about the movie Encanto, that the Disney movie that came out a few years ago. And I know it's one of my daughter's favorite movies, so we've watched it all the time and and we see the guys on, on horseback, and we see the whole thing where they're chasing down this, this young family. And they got the three little babies. Right. And, and and it's just this, this horrific sense that, that, that kind of thing could happen. And not long after a moment of unity in a country that that was, was at one time together on things, but now they are separated by violence and just this horrific thing based on, on political ideology. So talk a little bit more, Phelosha, about how you said it wasn't safe for them as a politically mixed marriage to it, really. I mean, I don't I don't know if people can grasp this, but there were towns and areas in the country where it was strictly for liberals or strictly for conservatives. If you're in a politically mixed marriage, there is no there is no refuge, right? There is no safe place. Talk a little bit more about that. And, and and how your family kind of kept that. I mean, as I recall from some of the works that I've seen of yours, they didn't talk about it for the longest time, but but they started to talk about it more as a more recently or.
[00:11:54:14] Phelosha Collaros: Right. Yes. Well, and I think part of it is because, the, the question that you asked is absolutely the right one. How do you get there? Right. You know, you had a situation at Columbia, and for anybody who's kind of enamored of entertainment around narco trafficking and kind of the more modern Colombia, I think it's important to understand that the, the whole narco environment, Colombia came after the political conflict, after the political violence, as a way to continue, political conflict and fund that. So the original the genesis of the violence in the country really was a political conflict between liberals and conservatives. And it was, as I learned about it, really impactful to me, because a lot of the civil wars that we hear about that have captured our imagination in terms of how can humanity get to this point have, has, conflicts around maybe religion, maybe ethnicity, maybe the two cultures don't speak the same language. And so you see this inherent, misunderstanding already in these conflicts because people are coming from different worldviews in a way that we're used to thinking about, right? Ethnicity, religion, and other identifying, issues, you know, language, nationality. But within this civil war, you had people that were really speaking the same language. They were basically all Catholic. You know, their divide, their identity divide was a liberal and conservative divide. And so when my mother started to talk more about her experience, you know, I just became obsessed with how did how did Colombia get there? And where are we on the path toward this type of conflict? And then, you know, by extension, can we turn the corner into a different direction? And I would say there was a couple of things that really stood out to me as we started to actually travel back to Colombia and go to historical archives, go to libraries, talk with archivists, talk with survivors. Some of the last living survivors of La Violencia, and ask them what their experience was. Talk about how people were pushed out of towns or cities. I actually met a wonderful a lovely, man who told me the story of, being just beaten unconscious after buying the wrong the newspaper for the area that he was in. And just being noticed, noticed, and people jumped him around the corner. He was not the right political party for that, that area. So I so I think what I would first say in terms of our personal story, and then I think we'll get into like the parallels with this country and then, you know, kind of the tipping points to political violence is that, is maybe a hopeful note, which is that while we saw violence that escalated to the point around political identity, where there were murders, where there was, people being pushed out of towns and areas, we also saw another element of humanity where people recognized each other's dignity and saved each other in those situations. And my grandfather was part of that story. You know, he, he had saved a conservative man's wife during childbirth. He my grandfather was a medical provider in a very small conservative town. And it was that husband who came to my grandfather when they were coming to kill him in his house. The conservatives were coming to to kill him and told him, warned him that he needed to flee for his life because he didn't want to see him get killed. So there was a lot of incidents of liberals saving conservatives, conservative saving liberals in the midst of this, extreme partisan violence, person to person, you know, daily violence that I think was very inspiring. So you see the undercurrent of common humanity, and then you see the overlay of how does a country start to allow this type of environment where everyday partisan violence is really.
[00:15:44:18] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah. And I think that's such an important point Phelosha is, is that that that foundation, that pro humanity foundation, if we can just show people the importance and the importance of that pro humanity footing cannot be overstated, in my opinion, because in the event that that we had had ever come to a point where or ever come to a point in this country where it gets so bad and we've now we've seen some some political violence in this country already. I mean, I live in the state of Minnesota, and we've we've definitely seen more than our share of, of ugliness, in this state recently with, with some local lawmakers being killed and, and and just that, that kind of ugliness. And and then during, during the, the, the joy of the George Floyd riots and how that was politicized and everything else and and there there is this thing that people need to start thinking about before they allow their emotions to, to start dictating their actions. And that's that, that pro human footing, that looking at all human beings and recognizing that we may have our differences, we may be unique individuals, we have our differences. But at the end of the day, there are there are many things that that we we need to understand, bring us together. The some of those things that bring us together are far more important than the, the things that that can keep us separated. So so with that being said, I mean, hearing hearing that story about your grandfather and how, how, how a, a member of the Conservative Party or warning him and helping him get out of there, is is just a beautiful example of the humanity in human beings and understanding that it doesn't have to come to violence, that we can help those that we disagree with politically out of horrible, horrible situations. And the more people start to to gravitate towards that pro humanity footing, the better off we're going to be. As, as, as a country, as a human race. It's just it cannot be overstated. So then let's let's step into that, that, that.
[00:18:13:18] Phelosha Collaros: Next. Absolutely. Yeah. So I think that what, what we saw when we looked at the history of Columbia was that this kind of, fractures in civil society, they take time to build, they take momentum and then ultimately they take like a lack of intervention, right, to get to the point that we saw, in that country. So some of the deep similarities between Colombia and the United States, I think are are important to note, because I think it also shows how we are we are, kind of a cousin on a similar path, and we should be attentive to that. You know, both countries were born out of bloody revolutions, right, that were justified by rights and justified by ideals. Actually, the founders of Colombia were very interested in the founders of America and the same kind of enlightenment, ideas that were coming out of Europe at the time that was encouraging these revolutions from the kind of seeds kings in, in Europe, right, in these new American colonies, so similar bloody revolutions, similarly formative civil wars. Right. So we had a formative civil war. So did Colombia that was shaped by ideology. So not again by opposing electric, ethnic or religious groups, but again, a formative civil war between liberals and conservatives in the past. And then after that, both countries have committed like committed to a winner take all two party system. Right. And the the issue with that where versus other countries where you see multiple parties and Colombia actually now exiting the violence has has turned into a country with multiple parties or coalition governments, is that this two party winner takes all system, creates kind of a, national environment where one side thinks that their beliefs, their needs can only be actuated when their side is in total control. Right. So that's kind of the macro context of it that I feel is very, very similar in both situations. Then you go down to the tipping points and what we saw, you know, interviewing people and looking into historical research was that you, you start with, so that's kind of like the macro situation. Now let's just look at like communities, right? Communities, society, civil society. In Colombia, communities were very, geographically isolated, where liberals were living in certain areas, that conservatives were living in certain areas. And then that became mutually reinforced as people sorted. Now, I think you've you've spoken about this on our podcast for a while, but we know a lot of political identity starts from the roots of you as, a family member. Right. What family are you born into? What town are you born into? What? You know, were you raised in the church? Not raised in the church. Like there's these fundamental roots of your political identity that start as early as your family. And we even see here in America, like, great majority of the people are still the political party that they were born into in terms of their family. Right. So you have that, then you have the personal formative experiences, right? That is your particular past, like your lived experience. And so what we were seeing in Colombia was a lot of people were born into a party state in that party were politically sorted into that area, and then they developed a sense of loyalty around that. Because again, if you have two tribes, right, you're like, okay, my tribe, I'm loyal to my tribe. We actually interviewed a delightful woman who said that her sister married the opposite political party, and defected. So it was that kind of feeling, you know, that, like, you're you're in, you're in or you're out, you know, you're loyal or you're not loyal. So then that that what happens. And I know you've talked about this too, in terms of quoting Monica Guzman. Right. Like if you have limited interaction with people of the opposite side, you have this overactive imagination about who they are. Right? Is that is that pretty much what she says?
[00:22:11:02] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah. She says those who are underrepresented in our life will be overrepresented in our mind, in our imagination. And then I always build upon that. And I think where you're going with this is we it's not that that that part of our imagination is thinking about all the great things that that the others are doing. Right. Because when we start to othering in this siloing, we're not thinking about the best things about those people, the other people. And it's, it's and I'll let you take it from there, because.
[00:22:39:12] Phelosha Collaros: Absolutely.
[00:22:40:13] Wilk Wilkinson: It is such an important point.
[00:22:42:15] Phelosha Collaros: Stereotyping comes from that, right? You know, a type of prejudice, in this case partisan prejudice, you know, like, and, and then comes in kind of the, the conflict entrepreneurs. Right. And we see that in this country too. You know, there are people that are increasing their bank accounts and their political power by being conflict entrepreneurs. And so enter the conflict entrepreneurs into that already kind of divided, you know, scene where people aren't interacting with each other and they don't know the other. And then the conflict entrepreneurs are going to come in and and start to amplify the divisions. Right. And then there's the people reward that amplification by, you know, either consuming the media that the conflict entrepreneurs are putting out. And I will say Colombia had bifurcated media way before we did. You know, they had liberal radio stations and conservative radio stations, liberal newspapers and conservative newspapers. So these conservative entrepreneurs are further dividing further amplifying division. And there's local politicians trying to rise to national prominence. So they want to differentiate themselves. And again, they're amplifying this division. And then you have that cycle of amplification and reward. And even if the people like in America are closer together with like policy polarization, right. Like maybe they they don't have that much differentiation. You know, in Colombia, it's like they're all Catholic, right? They're all families. They don't have a, huge, wish for differentiated government in a way that you would think this division warranted. But the effective polarization. Right. What do you think about the other whether you think that the other is evil, whether you think that the other is doing harm, and these conflicting entrepreneurs are telling you they're doing harm, they're harming the country, you know, they're they're, they're a harm to our future, the future of our children that starts to create this, this intolerance. Right? And this dehumanization and that reinforcing cycle is just pulling civil society further and further apart, until you get, you know, a lack of face and political solutions. Right? Really, what you need to do is dominate the other or annihilate the other. And that's when you tip into the worst scenario, which is everyday political violence.
[00:24:59:19] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, people have heard me talk time and time again about the fear, outrage and grievance model. And and just to be clear, that that's nothing new. I mean, this has been been going on for for centuries. And the reason it has been going on for centuries is because it's very effective. And you talked about effective polarization. And and I know Amanda Ripley calls them conflict entrepreneurs. I call them outrage entrepreneurs and grievance grifters and things like that. The, the the reason that we have people that do that is because they know how effective it is. And and like you said, they're either doing it for typically they're doing it for money or for power. And and then unfortunately, a lot of people. Especially with the onset of social media, people become influencers. They kind of get wrapped up in it. They they start to feel this thing and that that comes along with, you know, the impressions and the clicks and the things and it's it's an ugly thing. But when we think about the effective polarization that it causes and, and how we start to feel about those people on the other side, and, and you made such a great point, Phelosha, about how about people lose faith in the ability to come to a political solution, because often they see the politicians as being those people who are actually benefiting from the division. And and when they see that, when they see that, they go in their mind and it's hard to it's hard to fault people for for believing this because when they see that thing happening from those who are supposedly representing us. Which is why I came up with the phrase, those who represent us are far too often not the best of us. When they see that, they don't see a political solution to it, and they continuous that that whether it be going to Monica Guzman's point of of, overrepresented in our mind, in our imagination and then we start to believe the worst of these people. And then it's a it's an exponential process as we see more of it, we think less of those people and we think less of the ignorance, then then turns into to, to greater fear. That fear turns into anger, that anger turns into violence. And that's how we get well, we got that cost, what, upwards of 200,000 lives in in Colombia, back in the day?
[00:27:41:07] Phelosha Collaros: Absolutely, absolutely. And, you know, burned the capital, of Bogota. It was, that that day is called, the Bogota. So and that was kind of the the final match on a powder keg. You saw a lot of rural, regional violence in Colombia, citizen and citizen violence. That's where I keep going back to. It's like. Like, how does it get to the point where where citizens are taking it into their own hands? What? We were just talking about like, oh, it's not going to be a political solution. So if these people are evil, if they're a threat to me, if they're a threat to my future, well, I'm just going to take this into my own hands. We saw that start, in rural, kind of outpost first, where the government are like, infrastructure for policing was, was, was less. However, when police were sent to these areas, are the governments that were so committed to being, polarized and being double down on the two party system that they actually politicized their national police force so they would send, you know, liberal police into conservative areas or conservative police into liberal areas. And that just also exacerbated the problem. So you have it happening in the outskirts of the capital. Everybody thinks the capital is safe. At some point, Bogota, Colombia was actually called the Athens of, South America. So it was it was just considered this real kind of like, progressive in terms of science, technology at the time, you know, try to try to, bring in education for all the people and, you know, just, stable, stable democracy, decades of stable democracy and, then a political candidate was assassinated and, that was that political. Kennedy was assassinated. It just blew the lid off of everything, because it was kind of the final death knell that we are not going to find a, a solution to this, to this, situation in Colombia from a governmental standpoint. We're going to have to take the matters into our own hands. I worry about citizen, citizen violence, but I also very much worry about citizen, politician violence, you know, even sometimes when they are the worst of us. It is not a cycle that we want to create. To start, I don't. Oh, yes. Because it will just magnify and the violence will just continue to explode. And that is what that's what really ultimately led to the Bogota. So of 200,000 people dying in Bogota, burning.
[00:30:11:05] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah. It and it's horrific. I mean, I think, you know, it's kind of like one of those Archduke Ferdinand moments, right? Where where that's just the that's just the final spark that sets off the powder keg and, and things just go horrific after that. It's and there's nothing positive and there's violence is not the answer to to any of this. And when we think about what's going on in our country today and how politically divided we are, people just need to to remember that, that just because the fringe on this side believes this way and the fringe on that side believes that way. All human beings have have a lot more in common than what separates us. And, and there's an awful lot of people who are not nearly as divided. Phelosha. And I think you'll agree with this. We're not nearly as divided as those fringes would have you believe. But when we when we don't take note of those things that we are consuming, and then have a have a consciousness of our own biases and how those different things that we are consuming are affecting us. Things can get ugly pretty quickly in our own bubble, in our own mind, in our if we if we get stuck in our own silo and we don't pay attention to the others and and we start doing that othering and the siloing and things. So as we round out our time here, Phelosha, let's let's talk, we, we we could give examples all day of the ugliness of, of how depolarization can turn into to these violent masses and, and just just complete ugliness. But there's organizations out there. Braver Angels is one. Obviously, it's it's one that I, I work for and long before I work for them. I've been a volunteer with the organization because I believe it to be so important. Depolarwise, the organization that you have have started is another incredible organization doing great work not to not to end polarization, because there is a certain amount of value in polarization, but toxic polarization is what we need to depolarize.
[00:32:37:04] Phelosha Collaros: That is. The right point. Yes, because we don't want conformity, right? We don't where we want to have like a thriving civil society. Right. Like we're going to think about it from like a gauge from, from red to green. Right. So on red, we have what happened in Colombia. Right. Really low social trust, really low. Belonging really low. You know, kind of structures, institutions that, that were helping, and, and political violence. But if we're looking at this gauge like, let's move it to green, where we have, very high functioning civil society, you know, civil society that can then, solve problems through through government, through institutions. Right? A civil society where there's high belonging, where there's high social trust, like how do we move that gauge? And I think that there, you know, there are four points that came out in the kind of reflective research between Colombia and, America. And then I'll talk about how that kind of inspired me to create depolarize and the other things that we're doing, because there are intervention points, there really are. And the more people who know about those intervention points and engage in those interventions, we have that opportunity to not follow history. Right? We have the opportunity to create our own future. And I think it's so it's so important to focus on that. So thank you for bringing that up. I mean, I think the the first thing really is distancing yourself from conflict entrepreneurs. Right. I think when we have this kind of identity stacking where, you know, I see myself in this tribe or in this tribe and I'm only consuming content from conflict entrepreneurs, then you kind of get stuck in a bubble. So one of the things we strive to do with dipolar Weiskopf, is to let people know that there's a whole universe of people who are working on this, this intersectionality, right? Again, it's not just, the muddy middle. It's not just compromising down to agreeing with each other or not having conflict. It's people who are really grappling with and finding that way forward by by working toward the center, away from the conflict outwards. So we have a lot of books that people can read, constantly adding more books, constantly adding more, new sources that are focused on analyzing both sides. And then, you know, bringing together, a perspective that people can still have their own opinion about, right, but that it's not geared toward driving division. We have a lot of podcasts like yours, like your own on the site, that people are audio, learners. They can find their way through that. We have a lot of videos. If people are visual learners and they want to understand more about, the polarization and interventions and organizations through video that's there for them, organizations to join, such as Braver Angels and other, organizations to explore. So we just want to create this cluster in this universe of saying, hey, here's the whole the polarization of bridge building community. You are welcome to it. It's not mysterious. It's not exclusive, and it is growing and it is large. So we have this mindset that these extremes are, you know, that they're the majority of people, but really the majority is in the middle. Right. And and we've heard many people talk about that, that silent majority or that hopeful majority. And so really demonstrating that majority outlook and giving resources for that majority, I think what comes from that is a second point of intervention, which is helping people know that they can be passionate about their beliefs and needs, which could be completely different from my beliefs in it, but that they can have that passion and have those needs without partisan purity. Right? I don't want these things for myself, my future, my family, because I'm a Democrat or a Republican. I want these things for reasons of human flourishing, of, ideas, of what I think is going to make progress in this country, what's going to make a stronger civil society. And I can hold those beliefs and needs without this loyalty to one party, to it or another, so that we can then have conversations across divides about how to actuate. Where are those beliefs and needs that we have in common? And, what are the underlying values that we have in common so we can make some forward momentum on that? And then I think that comes to like the, the two last things. One, now you're building positive interactions with people of the other side because you've gotten under these identities and these positions, and now you're working to solve problems, right? So we go from not having any interaction with people of the opposite side to having interaction with them. Healthy conflict, maybe coming to third ways that might even be better solutions than we thought about in our own bubble and solving problems together. And I think that at the end of the day, for affective polarization, working together to solve problems is that key intervention point that we should be looking at as a country.
[00:37:34:06] Wilk Wilkinson: You're absolutely right, Phelosha, being part of a community, interacting with people who's whose mindsets, whose thinking is different than ours will be the best way to, to to kind of tame that affective polarization. And, and those conversations are the same conversations that are going to bring us to real results, bring us to, to, to a way to work together to better our communities so that we can flourish as a nation. Phelosha Collaros, Thank you so much for this incredible conversation. Thank you for all you're doing. The website again is depolarwize.com also Braver Angels.org. We be part of this community be part of this movement. It could not be more important. Thank you so much very very much for that. Thank you.
[00:38:23:07] Phelosha Collaros: My pleasure. Thank you for the wonderful conversation, Wilk.
[00:38:28:08] Wilk Wilkinson: Friends, I want to thank you so much for tuning in. And if there's anything in this episode that provided exceptional value to you, please make sure to hit that share button. If you haven't done so already, please be sure to subscribe to get the Derate the Hate podcast sent to your email inbox every week. We really are better together, so please take a moment to visit Braver angels.org and consider joining the movement towards civic renewal and bridging our political divides. This is Wilk wrapping up for the week saying get out there. Be kind to one another. Be grateful for everything you've got. And remember, it's up to you to make every day the day that you want it to be. With that, my friends, I'm going to back on out of here and we will catch you next week. Take care.
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