Interview Results!

Well, I did it.

More than 100 interviews.

More than 100 complete strangers.

They’re in the can.

And for about five minutes, I had this wonderful feeling of accomplishment.

I thought, “Holy shit. I finished.”

Then I looked at all the footage.

And realized:

“Oh, no. I haven’t finished anything.”

I’ve just created an enormous amount of work for myself.

Because the interviews are over.

But the actual project starts now.

What I’ve got sitting in front of me is an absolute powder keg of information.

More than 100 people.

More than 100 lives.

More than 100 different perspectives on what matters, what’s wrong, what we want, what we’re afraid of, and what we might actually be able to accomplish together.

And I’ve got bloopers.

Oh, I’ve got some choice bloopers.

You cannot walk around Greensboro asking strangers questions with a camera rolling and not eventually capture some spectacular shit.

And that’s part of the story too.

Because people are funny.

People are weird.

People are unpredictable.

Thank God.

But now I’ve got a responsibility.

I’ve got hours and hours of footage, and somehow I have to turn all of that into one hour that somebody actually wants to watch.

And I don’t want to make a political commercial.

I don’t want to make propaganda.

I don’t want to take 100 people and cherry-pick five answers that prove John Eagleton was right all along.

What the hell would be the point of that?

I already know what I think.

I want to know what they think.

So now I’ve got to go back through everything.

Listen again.

And this time, I’m not the interviewer.

I’m the student.

What did people actually say?

Where did they agree?

Where did they completely disagree?

What surprised me?

What changed my mind?

What made me laugh?

What made me uncomfortable?

And maybe most importantly:

What did I miss the first time?

Because something started happening during these interviews.

I went into this project thinking America was horribly divided.

That’s what we’re told every day.

Turn on television:

We’re divided.

Get online:

We’re divided.

Open social media:

Good Lord, apparently half the country wants to kill the other half before lunch.

But then I went outside.

And I talked to actual human beings.

And that’s where things got interesting.

Because once you get past the labels, people start sounding remarkably familiar.

Not identical.

That’s important.

We’re not identical.

We disagree about politics.

Religion.

Race.

Money.

Government.

Probably barbecue.

And in North Carolina, barbecue may be the disagreement that finally destroys the republic.

But underneath all of that, I kept hearing the same basic human concerns.

People want to feel safe.

They want a decent place to live.

They want to make enough money to survive.

They want healthcare when they’re sick.

They want their children to have opportunities.

They want their families to be okay.

They want dignity.

They want to be heard.

They want some reason to believe tomorrow might be better than today.

And I started thinking:

Wait a minute.

If we agree on all that…

What the hell are we fighting about all day?

Maybe we’re spending so much time arguing about how to get somewhere that we’ve forgotten we mostly want to arrive at the same place.

That’s the story I’m looking for in this footage.

But here’s the deal:

I don’t get to decide the conclusion before I finish listening.

Maybe these interviews prove my theory.

Maybe they complicate it.

Maybe they blow holes in it.

Good.

Put that in the film too.

Because I don’t want this special to tell you what to think.

I want you to meet the people I met.

I want you to see the woman I approached because something about her caught my attention.

I want you to meet the young person I thought I understood until they opened their mouth and completely surprised me.

I want you to hear the answers that stopped me cold.

And I want you to laugh at the moments where the whole damn experiment went sideways.

Because somewhere inside all of that footage is Greensboro.

And maybe somewhere inside Greensboro is a little snapshot of America.

That’s what I’m trying to find.

One hour.

One hundred strangers.

No pundits.

No politicians telling us what everybody supposedly believes.

Just people.

Talking.

Listening.

Laughing.

Disagreeing.

Thinking.

Being human.

And if I can put that together correctly, I think it could be powerful.

Maybe even a game changer.

Not because I have some brilliant answer.

I’ve become increasingly suspicious of anybody who claims to have all the brilliant answers.

Including me.

Maybe the game changer is much simpler.

Talk to somebody.

Talk to somebody who doesn’t look like you.

Talk to somebody you wouldn’t normally approach.

Ask them a real question.

Then do the hardest thing in America today:

Shut up and listen to the answer.

Don’t correct them.

Don’t convert them.

Don’t immediately tell them why they’re wrong.

Just listen.

Because that’s what happened to me.

I set out to interview 100 strangers because I wanted to understand America.

And somewhere along the way, those strangers started teaching me about myself.

So yes—the interviews are finished.

More than 100 are in the can.

I’ve got the footage.

I’ve got the bloopers.

I’ve got the stories.

I’ve got an absolute powder keg of information.

Now comes the hard part.

Tell the truth about what I found.

And if I can do that…

Maybe Greensboro gets to show America something we’ve forgotten:

We don’t have to agree about everything.

We don’t even have to like each other all the time.

But we’re living in the same country.

We’re trying to solve many of the same problems.

And we’re trying to build some version of the same damn future.

So maybe we could spend a little less time bitching at each other…

and a little more time talking to each other.

The first 100 conversations are finished.

Now let’s see where the next one takes us.