Derate The Hate

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Roshan Bliss has spent his career working the space between people who disagree — first as a mediator, then as a public deliberation practitioner, and now as the architect of one of the more ambitious bridging projects out there: a reality TV show called A House Divided.

Roshan and Wilk dig into the idea of “many-to-many” conflict — why...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Kelsey Blahnik has spent her career as a social worker sitting across from people who don't see eye to eye—politically, personally, every which way—and she's found that peace was never about avoiding the hard conversation. It's about learning how to have it.

In this episode, Kelsey and Wilk dig into her book, The And Way: Assertive Peacemaking in a...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Erez Levin spent nearly a decade inside Google's ad tech world before becoming one of the loudest internal voices warning that the industry was built to reward quantity over quality — and that those same broken incentives are what fuel outrage, fear, and grievance across the wider internet.

Now Erez writes at Holding the Line, where he makes the case for...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Paid protesting is one of the most divisive — and misunderstood — topics in American civic life. Adam Swart, founder of Crowds on Demand, has spent over a decade inside that world, organizing demonstrations across the political spectrum. In this conversation, he pulls back the curtain on how modern protests actually get funded, coordinated, and am...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Elizaveta Friesem has spent her career trying to understand why people who could be connected end up disconnected instead — and why so much of that disconnection gets explained away with blame. Her book, Media Is Us, starts from a simple but disruptive idea: media isn't some outside force manipulating us. It's just another form of human communication, s...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Shaka Mitchell is a lawyer and education policy veteran who built something unusual out of a pandemic-era habit: getting friends together once a month, picking songs tied to a theme, and talking about why. That casual ritual became the Come Together Music Project, now a podcast and live event series Shaka's run with friends, strangers, and colleagues across t...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Maryam Mehrtash spent nearly two decades building narratives for Marvel, Disney, Paramount, and some of the biggest brands in entertainment. Before that, she was a refugee kid learning English from cartoons, carrying forward the storytelling legacy of a grandmother who was imprisoned in Iran for the same gift.

In this conversation, Wilk and Maryam dig into wha...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Julia Minson has spent 25 years studying disagreement—not how to win arguments, but how people actually engage with views that conflict with their own. She’s a Harvard professor, a behavioral scientist, and the author of How to Disagree Better. This conversation gets into the heart of her research.

One of the most useful ideas in the episode: being...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Diego Sanchez grew up undocumented in the United States. Jim Robb spent nearly thirty years fighting for immigration restrictions. They sat down at the same table, and discovered something neither of them fully expected: they could trust each other.

This bonus episode drops ahead of the 2026 Braver Angels National Convention in Philadelphia—where Diego a...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

What if the problem isn't the people on the other side — what if the problem is just hard? Martin Carcasson has spent 20 years building deliberative processes in Northern Colorado that help communities move from argument to action. The Center for Public Deliberation he founded at CSU has run over 600 community meetings, working with local governments, s...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Jan Jekielek spent years as a human rights worker before becoming a journalist — and the story he couldn't stop following eventually became Killed to Order, a New York Times bestselling investigation into China's forced organ harvesting industry. In this conversation, Jan and Wilk focus on a question at the center of both the book and the show: what doe...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Kevin Dolan and Peter Calfee met at a Veterans Day luncheon in 2022 and spent three years writing Hijacked: Our Republic — a book built around one essential question: what does it take to keep what the founders built?

In this conversation, Kevin and Peter walk through the six foundational pillars they believe hold a republic together — critical thi...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Brian Vogt spent 20-plus years strengthening democracy around the world. Then he came home—and started listening. His Democracy Listening Tour of Red America is a qualitative research project with a simple but radical premise: before you can reform anything, you have to understand what people actually believe and why.

In this conversation, Brian and Wilk...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Michael Lee is a professor of communication and the director of the Civility Initiative at the College of Charleston. He came to civility work through competitive debate—and found that debate, at its best, is deeply connective and dialogic. In this conversation, Michael and Wilk explore what’s really going on when people avoid disagreement, and wh...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

What happens when a gun violence prevention researcher walks into a gun shop, sits down with the owner, and actually listens? For Dr. Michael Siegel, it changed everything.

In this episode, Wilk sits down with Dr. Mike Siegel to talk about his Bridging the Divide on Firearm Policy project — a three-year effort that brought together 23 gun owners and ...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Many Americans now feeling we’re too divided to agree on anything. Rich Harwood disagrees — and he has the stories to back it up. In this episode, Rich returns to DTH to talk about the new moral vision he sees emerging across the country: a shared yearning for decency, dignity, and the belief that we can still come together and get things done.

Ric...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Corey Nathan, host of "Talkin' Politics and Religion Without Killin' Each Other" joins Wilk for a conversation about what it actually takes to bridge divides, starting with one of the hardest conversations a person can have: telling your Orthodox Jewish father you've become a Christian.

They dig into the real mechanics of tribalism — how confirmation bia...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Spike Cohen — 2020 Libertarian VP candidate, founder of You Are The Power — sits down with Wilk to talk about what happens when families are torn apart by a system that never had to answer to anyone. Until now.

You Are The Power is a nonprofit that steps in when local government oversteps. They research cases, amplify stories, organize people, and ...

Send Wilk a text with your feedback! (incoming msgs only - I can't reply)

Most people have spent their entire lives being measured — by achievement, status, approval, income, influence. It feels normal because it's constant. But Regi Wilson, founder of Equal Universe and creator of the Value Identity framework, argues that this is exactly the problem. We've been running on a broken definition of human worth, and the damage sh...