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Ezra Klein Interview with Barack Obama — “EK: Something I noticed again and again in the book is this very particular approach to persuasion that you have. I think the normal way most of us think about persuasion is you are trying to win an argument with someone. You seem to approach it with this first step of making yourself a person that the other person will feel able to listen to, which means sympathizing with their argument, sanding off some of the edges of your own. Tell me a bit about how you think about that.

BO: Now, that’s interesting. I forget whether it was Clarence Darrow, or Abraham Lincoln, or some apocryphal figure in the past who said the best way to win an argument is to first be able to make the other person’s argument better than they can. For me, what that meant was that I had to understand their worldview.

And I couldn’t expect them to understand mine if I wasn’t extending myself to understand theirs...” (read more)