How to Be a Pebble in Someone’s Shoe

The paradox of persuasion, explained by two American cousins.

By Amanda Ripley, Builders Movement Partner

Mike and Dave Koehn should have stopped speaking to each other several years ago. Mike, who lives in Wisconsin, is a devout Christian who has voted for President Trump three times. His cousin Dave, who splits his time between Wisconsin and Virginia, finds Trump immoral on many levels and has never voted for him. During the pandemic, Mike showed up to a family Zoom wearing a MAGA hat, and Dave was appalled.

Yet somehow, the Koehn cousins are closer today than they have ever been. And they talk about politics more than ever. The Koehn cousins have gone rogue, in other words. They are actively resisting mainstream political culture in America by staying in a relationship, without stifling their core beliefs.

Which is wild because, over here in the rest of the country, two-thirds of Americans say they avoid talking about politics with family. Others have severed ties altogether. This year, 56 percent of Americans surveyed by the Pew Research Center said they’ve stopped talking to someone about political or election news because of something they said (up from 45 percent in 2024).

This withdrawal is understandable. I’ve done it myself. It can seem futile (even masochistic) to do otherwise. And a debate can easily escalate, shredding relationships and ruining family barbecues. The problem is, silence makes us all more vulnerable to manipulation and mistakes. It’s much easier to believe your opponents are monsters if you don’t talk to them.

I met the Koehn cousins earlier this month at a conference organized by Braver Angels, the country’s largest volunteer-led nonprofit working to reduce partisan division. (I’m an unpaid advisor to Braver Angels because I believe in their mission.) The cousins spoke on the conference main stage in Philadelphia, and they held a breakout session on how to talk politics with family.

Now, I have to admit, I kept my notebook in my bag for the beginning of this conversation, sipping my coffee in the back row. I’ve been writing about polarization for almost a decade, so I was pretty sure I was going to hear the usual takeaway — which generally boils down to: “Don’t try to change each other!”

That is sound advice, to be fair. The more you try to change someone, the harder they will resist. The technical term for this is “psychological reactance,” as Brown University psychologist Yael Schonbrun explains in her forthcoming book,Why Don’t You Understand Me? "when people feel their perspective is being invalidated or attacked, they don’t become more open to alternative viewpoints—they double down on what they already believe.” You can end up driving your loved one into the arms of your enemy, in other words, without even realizing what you’ve done.

Instead, we are told (again and again) to “be curious.” And this, too, is technically correct. But curiosity is a deeply unsatisfying substitute for trying to force someone to change. It’s like craving a chocolate donut and being offered a nice apple instead.

The Paradox of Persuasion

But Dave Koehn said something slightly different in Philadelphia, something that made me get out my notebook after all: “You’re not changing the other person, but you’re learning to exist as a pebble in their shoe.”

This is the central paradox of persuasion, rarely so well-articulated: You can’t change people by pressuring them to change. But you can quietly influence them — if you try to understand them instead. “You’re not changing them,” Dave said, “but you’re a little bit changing them.” You can become a little voice in their head, making it harder for them to dismiss you and people like you. And vice versa.

“It can be irritating at times,” Mike said about having Dave as a pebble in his shoe. “You want to shake that bad boy out so bad,” Dave agreed. But if you don’t, you can end up closer — and saner. It’s not for everyone, and there are risks involved. But the alternatives are risky, too. “Those differences don’t go away, and in isolation, they fester,” Mike said. “And when things fester, they have a tendency to bite you eventually.”

What does it look like to become a pebble in someone’s shoe? Well, after Mike wore the MAGA hat on Zoom, he heard through another relative that the hat had bothered Dave. So he took a risk, and he called his cousin. “I heard you were upset about my hat,” he said. He listened as Dave explained that the hat had surprised and confused him. It didn’t line up with the person he thought he knew. In response, Mike did not tell Dave he was being a snowflake. Instead, he explained that, for him, the hat was not meant to be a provocation. “It was Covid, my hair was long and I just threw on a hat. I wasn’t sticking it in your eye.” That was a good start, but much remained unspoken.

A year went by. Dave got a job as the play-by-play broadcaster for the Milwaukee Bucks basketball team. That meant he’d be spending months on end near Mike, who was working in technology sales about 30 miles away. It felt like a sign. So Dave chose to take a risk of his own. “I decided to get to know Mike again. I don’t know where it will go, but I’m not going to look back ten years from now and say I didn’t try.” And the truth is, he was curious—about how someone he’d admired his whole life could be seeing Trump so differently from him.

“My bubble was red, and his bubble was blue,” Mike said. “And we had a choice. We could have just tolerated each other and gone our separate ways, but thanks to Dave and his prodding, he encouraged me to really put some effort into trying to figure this out, for the sake of the country.”

Don’t Vent

They started talking more often, only bringing up politics after they’d gotten to know each other again. “I knew his essence was incredibly good,” Dave said about Mike. “So I had a really hard time understanding—how does he reconcile, as a good person, something I view as being pretty below board?” Almost immediately, they realized they were living in totally different information bubbles. So they started sending each other articles every so often—but not too often, importantly.

Then Dave’s sister told him about Braver Angels, and Dave and Mike attended the 2024 convention together in Kenosha, Wisconsin. There, they found more than 700 other people trying to live in the paradox.

Slowly, they started to glimpse what was underneath each other’s worldviews. But that took time, and they made mistakes. “There’s a tendency to want to vent in these conversations,” Dave said. “Don’t vent.” If he or Mike started piling on, Dave would try to say something like, “Neither one of us is an expert on this.” Humility became a kind of home base for both of them.

Allow Ambivalence

It became clear that Mike’s faith was the driving force behind his political views. Dave’s climate dread fueled many of his views. Both of them cared deeply about the country’s future.

They mustered the courage to acknowledge their own ambivalence, something Mike even did publicly in Philadelphia: “I struggle with Trump,” he said in the breakout session. “He’s arrogant. I could go on and on. But I personally think we’re in better hands with him as president than we were with Biden.”

During the protests against ICE in Minnesota, the cousins disagreed about who was to blame for the violence. And, at the same time, they agreed that ICE agents should wear body cameras and be held accountable for their actions.

Recently, they did something downright radical: Dave tried to summarize Mike’s position on climate change, and Mike tried to do the same for Dave. Even after all this time, they still didn’t get it exactly right. (Mike was not denying that humans had played a role in warming the planet, he clarified, but he did not think humans alone had the power to destroy the planet.)

Holding this level of complexity in your head can be exhausting. But you end up with a fuller picture of reality. “I have friends who are blue, militant [Democrats],” Dave said, “and they say these blanket things about what people on the Right think. And I’m like, ‘They ain’t thinking that. It’s coming from a different place.’”

That is exactly the kind of thing you say when you have a pebble in your shoe. You start becoming a pebble in other people’s shoes. It’s annoying, in the most patriotic possible way.

Amanda Ripley is an American journalist, author, and Builders Movement Partner. She has written features for Time magazine and contributes to The Atlantic. Her book The Smartest Kids in the World was a New York Times bestseller. This article originally appeared on her new Substack, The Understory.