This episode is an audio only version of our TV program "A Braver Arkansas," a TV partnership between Braver Angels Arkansas and Arkansas TV, Arkansas's public television network. It was first aired August 18, 2026. A Braver Arkansaspremiered Tuesday, July 7, 2026, at 6 p.m. on Arkansas TV. A new episode is shown every two weeks, and all episodes are available on demand after they air by searching for the show A Braver Arkansas in the Public Affairs section of the Arkansas TV YouTube channel at: https://www.youtube.com/@arkansastv.

In this episode, hosts April Chatham-Carpenter and Glen White open by demonstrating something Braver Angels calls the LAPP skills — Listen, Acknowledge/Agree, Pivot, Perspective — including an unscripted admission from Glen about times he's gotten it wrong, and a live role-play on a genuinely divisive topic that shows how the skills work (and don't) in real time. Then they sit down with Dawn Groover, a retired hospice nurse from Carroll County who found Braver Angels while she was losing the ability to talk to her own sons about politics. What she describes isn't a tidy fix — it's a slow, sometimes humbling process that changed how she listens, what she reads, and eventually where she'd place herself on the political spectrum. She's since helped start a new Braver Angels alliance in Northwest Arkansas. Glen and April close with a franker-than-usual discussion of the psychology behind why these conversations are so hard in the first place.