Probably the biggest one for me is how I look at political identity and tribal certainty. Ten years ago, I think I was a lot more willing to see people as “left” or “right” based on one opinion, and to assume that certain takes just came packaged with a whole worldview. But over time, talking to a ridiculous range of people, I’ve changed my mind hard on that. People are way messier than the labels. A guy can be dead wrong on one thing and super thoughtful on five other things. Or vice versa. What caused it? Conversations, man. Long-form conversations. Letting people actually explain themselves instead of reducing them to a hashtag. I’ve seen over and over that if you ask, “What would change your mind?” you find out really quickly who’s thinking and who’s just performing ideology. And I’ve also realized how often people, including me, can catastrophize, overgeneralize, or just absorb the beliefs of their tribe without really digging in. Another big shift tied to that: I’ve become way more suspicious of certainty on complex issues. Climate, race, culture, gender, politics, all of it. Not because truth doesn’t exist, but because a lot of people speak with insane confidence about stuff they haven’t seriously studied. I’ve done that too. You catch yourself and go, “Wait, do I actually know this, or am I just repeating a team slogan?” So yeah, if I had to boil it down: I changed my mind from thinking the world is mostly divided into obvious good guys and bad guys with predictable beliefs, to thinking most people are complicated, tribal, biased, and still worth hearing out. That shift came from exposure to a lot of different minds, and from realizing certainty is often a mask for shallow thinking.

You got it, brother.