Talk Cocktail

Author: Jeff Schechtman

Jeff Schechtman talks with authors, journalists, and thought leaders.
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Language: en

Genres: History, News, News Commentary

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Debate Doesn’t Matter
Episode 680
Monday, 28 July, 2025

What if everything we believe about changing political minds is wrong? The real work of transformation happens elsewhere. What if everything we believe about changing minds is wrong? What if the foundation of democratic discourse — the belief that better arguments lead to better outcomes — is not just flawed but destructively naive? Sarah Lubrano, with her PhD from Oxford and years of writing about the intersection of psychology and politics, brings devastating news: Decades of research reveal that political debates don’t change minds; they calcify them. Her book Don’t Talk About Politics reads like a clinical study of American democracy, dissecting why our most sacred ritual of reasoned argument has become democracy’s poison pill. But Lubrano’s diagnosis goes far beyond the failure of debate. She reveals something more troubling: We’ve accidentally engineered a society that systematically prevents the kinds of human connections that actually do transform political thinking.